everywhere into soldiers and sailors. The bits of talk you overhear in
the street are so exciting that you become a professional eavesdropper,
strong-languaged, picturesquely slangy, pungent narrative. Sometimes the
speaker has come up from Arizona, or New Mexico or Texas, sometimes down
from Alaska, Washington or Oregon, sometimes across from Nevada or
Montana or Wyoming. And with many of them - at least with those that
live west of the rocky mountains - San Francisco is always (and I never
failed to respond to the thrill of it) "the city". Not a city or any
city, but the city - as though there were no other city on the face of
the earth.

All this alien picturesqueness adds enormously of course to the San
Franciscan's native picturesqueness. Not that the Californian needs
adventitious aid in this matter. Indeed this cosmopolitanism of
atmosphere serves best as a background, these alien types as a foil, for
the native-born. For the Californians are a comely people. No traveler
has failed - at least no man has failed - to pay tribute in passing to
the Californian women. And they are beautiful. In that climate which
produces bigness in everything, they grow to heroic size. And as a
result of a life, inevitably open-air in an atmosphere always
fog-touched, they have eyes of a notable limpidity and complexions of a
striking vividness. To walk through that limited area which is the
city's heart - especially when the theatres are letting out - is to come
on beauty not in one pretty girl at a time, nor in pairs and trios, nor
by scores and dozens; it is to see it in battalias and acres, and all of
them meeting your eyes with the frank open gaze of the West. San
Francisco is, I fancy, the only city on the globe where any musical
comedy audience is always more beautiful than any musical comedy chorus.
They are not only beautiful - they are magnificent.