The sweetness of the dying spring day flooded the city, and its very
essence pierced Julia's heart with a vague pain that was a pleasure,
too. Presently she and Connie walked to California Street, and climbed a
steep block or two to the Maison Montiverte.

Julia and her mother, and a large proportion of their acquaintances,
dined chez Montiverte perhaps a hundred times a year. There was a
regular twenty-five-cent dinner that was extremely good, there was a
fifty-cent dinner fit for a king, and there were specialties de la
maison, as, for example, a combination salad at twenty cents that was a
meal in itself. Irrespective of the other order, the guest of the Maison
Montiverte was regaled with boiled shrimps or crabs' legs while he
waited for his dinner, was eagerly served with all the delicious French
bread and butter that he could eat, and had a little cup of superb black
coffee without charge to finish his meal. Brilliant piano music swept
the rooms whenever any guest cared to send the waiter with a five-cent
piece to the old mechanical piano, and sprightly conversation, carried
on from table to table, gave the place that tone that Monsieur
Montiverte considered to be its most valuable asset. Monsieur himself
was a dried-up little rat of a man, grizzled, and as brown as a walnut.
Madame was large and superb and young, smooth faced, brown haired, regal
in manner. It was said that Madame had had a predecessor, a lady now
living in France, whose claim upon Jules Montiverte was still valid.
However that might be, it did not seem to worry Jules, nor his calm and
lovely companion, nor their two daughters, black-eyed baby girls, whose
heavy straight hair was crimped at the ends into bands of brownish-black
fuzz, and who wore white stockings and tasselled boots, and flounced,
elaborately embroidered white dresses on Sundays. Whatever their bar
sinister, the Montivertes flourished and grew rich, and a suspicion of
something irregular, some high-handed disposition of the benefit of