“Cross my heart, you’re a beaut.”
“But that doesn’t get me any further with my troubles.”
“What are his bad points that make you hold off?”
“Nothing more than a feeling, I suppose. No, it’s more than that—something definite. It’s—I find this thing hard to say. Not exactly weakness in him—more a lack of proved strength. He inherited his money; he’s had the regular Eastern education. He’s at work, managing his properties. But I’d feel so much more secure of his strength if he had 223 made it for himself. That is the thing I could admire most in a man; more even than kindness. To have him succeed from nothing because his strength was in it. I don’t care how unfinished he might be—that would show he was a man!”
Bertram was still pausing on this, when Kate touched his arm.
“I’m afraid,” she said, “that we must join the others. They’ll be talking about us if we don’t, and we mustn’t have that—for Eleanor’s sake if for no other!” They hurried ahead, therefore, and walked beside Mr. and Mrs. Masters all the way in.
At the studio door, Kate declined a half-accepted invitation to remain for the night.
“Mother isn’t wholly well,” she said, “and I can be fearfully domestic in emergency! It’s only a step to the Valencia Street cars, and Mr. Bertram will get me home.”
It was still too early for the theatre crowd; they found themselves alone on the outer seat of a “dummy” car, one of those rapid transit conveyances by which San Francisco of old let the passenger decide whether that amorphic climate was summer or winter.
He had, it seemed, to shake her back into 224 the story of her love-affair. Three times he approached the subject, and each time she fended it off. They had passed clear into the Mission, were more than three-quarters of the way home, before he launched one of his frontal assaults.