of a drug store, the day I landed in San Francisco, where men took their
morning paper and threw down a nickel, and even made change for a dime.
Right out on the pavement - a lot of nickels lying loose and no one
paying any attention. Why, in New York - well, it couldn't be done in
New York, that's all.

It's not because San Francisco is not metropolitan. For San Francisco is
essentially a city just as Los Angeles will always be a terribly big
country village. It's not at all a matter of population. In Connecticut,
we always said that Bridgeport was a city, and New Haven which was
larger, was not. It's a bing, and a zip, and a tra-la-la-lah, that makes
one city a city and another not. I can explain it no other way.

But with all its cityfiedness, there is a strange lack of suspicion, a
free and easy attitude toward mere physical money, that one finds in no
other large city except San Francisco. In the stores the clerks will
say: "Shall I put it in a sack?" and you answer just as they hoped you
would: "Oh, no, I'll slip it right in my bag." In New York as soon as
one did that she'd be nabbed on the way out for a shoplifter.

Perhaps the constant use of silver money has had something to do with
the matter. Paper money can be tucked away. Silver is more spendable,
everyone knows that. Break a five-dollar bill into "iron men," and it's
gone, gone. And yet it can't be the use of silver money alone that
accounts for it. Reno has silver money, and yet there is little of the
old, free Western spirit left in Reno.

No, it's something to do with San Francisco where suspicion doesn't yet
grip the hearts of men and where money is made to spend.