Every Sunday afternoon during the picking season, Mrs. Tiffany served tea on the lawn for the half-dozen familiar households on the Santa Lucia tract. That was the busy time of all the year, affording no leisure for those dinners and whist parties which came in the early season, when the country families had just arrived from town, or in the late season, when prune picking grew slack. Night finds one weary in the country, even when his day has brought only supervision of labor. These town-bred folk, living from the soil and still but half welded to it, fell unconsciously into farmer habits in this working period.

The Goodyears and the Morses, more formal than their neighbors, did indeed give a dinner once or twice a summer to this or that visitor from San Francisco or San Jose. Otherwise, the colony gathered only at this Sunday afternoon tea of Mrs. Tiffany’s. Her place lay about midway of the colony, her lawn, such as it was no lawn flourishes greatly in that land of dry summers was the oldest and best kept of all; further, they had acquired the habit. Already, these Californians were beginning a country life remotely like that of England; a country life made gracious by all the simple refinements, from bathtubs to books. They had settled, too, into the ways of a clique; small and informal as their entertainments were, minor jealousies of leadership had developed already.

By a kind of consent never yet made law by any contest, the Goodyears were leaders and dictators. He, Raleigh Goodyear, was passably rich; his wife was by birth of that old Southern set which dominated the society of San Francisco from its very beginning. Until their only daughter married into the army and, by her money and connections, advanced her husband to a staff position in Washington, Mrs. Goodyear had figured among the patrons to those cotillions and assemblies by which the elect, under selection of a wine agent, set themselves off from the aspiring. Them the colony treated with familiar deference.

Mrs. Tiffany, whose native desire to please and accommodate had grown with her kind of matrimony, held social leadership of a different kind. Her summer house was the boudoir of this colony, as her town house was the centre for quiet and informal entertainment just tinged with Bohemia. Hers was the gate at which one stopped for a greeting and a chat as one drove past on the road; she was forever running to that gate. She knew the troubles of all her neighbors, both the town dwellers of her set and the humbler folk who made fruit farming more of a business. That rather silent husband of hers a man getting an uncomfortable peace from the end of a turbulent and disappointing life which had just escaped great success told her that she had one great fault of the head. She must always make a martyr of herself by bearing the burdens of her world.

The Judge and Mrs. Tiffany sat now, in the early afternoon of a summer Sunday, under the gigantic live-oak which shadowed their piazza. She was crocheting a pink scarf, through which her tiny fingers flew like shuttles; he was reading. Out beyond their hacienda, the American “hands,” fresh-shaved for Sunday, lolled on the ground over a lazy game of cards. From the creek bottom further on, came a sound which, in the distance, resembled the drumming of cicadas a Chinese workman was lulling his ease with a moon-fiddle. Near at hand stood the tea things, all prepared before Molly, the maid, started for her Sunday afternoon visit to the camp of the women cutters. Factory girls from the city, these cutters, making a vacation of the summer work.

Mrs. Tiffany glanced up from her yarns at the leonine head of her husband, bent above “The History of European Morals,” opened her mouth as though to speak; thought better of it, apparently. Twice she looked up like this, her air showing that she was not quite confident of his sympathy in that which she meant to bring forward.

“Edward!” she said at length, quite loud. He lowered the book and removed his reading glasses, held them poised a characteristic gesture with him. He said no word; between them, a glance was enough.

“You remember the young man who went over with Eleanor to drive away the Ruggles bull?”

Judge Tiffany gave assent by a slight inclination of his head.

“I went over to the camp of those University boys yesterday,” she went on, running loops with incredible speed, “and I don’t quite like the way they are living there. They associate too much with the cutting-women. You know, Edward, that isn’t good for boys of their age and they must be nice at bottom or they wouldn’t be trying to work their way through college ”

She stopped as though to note the effect. The ripple of a smile played under Judge Tiffany’s beard. She caught at her next words a little nervously.

“You know we have a responsibility for the people about the place, Edward I couldn’t bear to think we’d let any nice college boy degenerate because we employed him and it is so easy at their age.”

“Which means,” broke in the Judge, “that you have asked this Mr. Chester up here to tea.”

“If if you wish it, Edward.”

“I can’t very well countermand your invitation and tell him by the foreman not to come. But I warn you that this social recognition will serve as no excuse if I catch him picking any more green apricots.”

Mrs. Tiffany, unturned by this breeze of criticism, ran along on her own tack.

“His manners are a little forward, but he has a nice way of speaking. I’m sure he is a gentleman, at bottom. You can’t expect such a young man, who has been obliged to work his way, to have all the graces at once. They’ve brought down their town clothes I saw them last Sunday so you needn’t be afraid of that. I’ve asked Mr. Heath, too.”

“Is that by way of another introduction?” asked Judge Tiffany. His eyes looked at her severely, but his beard showed that he was smiling gently again. Half his joy in a welded marriage lay in his appreciation of her humors, as though one should laugh at himself.

“Oh, there’s no doubt that he’s a gentleman. He is less loud, somehow, than Mr. Chester, though he hasn’t his charm. It seems there is the most wonderful boy friendship between them.”

“Where did you get all this insight into the social life of our employees?” asked Judge Tiffany; and then, “Mattie, you’ve been exposing yourself to the night air again.”

“Over at their camp last evening,” said Mrs. Tiffany. “Well, and isn’t it my business to look after after that side of the ranch?” she added.

The Judge had dropped the book now; his senses were alert to the game which never grew old to him “Mattie-baiting” he had named it.

“Mattie,” he said, “with a pretty and marriageable, dowered and maiden niece on your hands, a new era is opening in your life of passionate self-sacrifice. It used to be orphan children and neglected wives of farm hands. Now it is presentable but neglected bachelors. Your darling match for Eleanor, I suppose, would be some young soul snatched from evil courses, pruned, trimmed, and delivered at the altar with ‘Made by Mattie Tiffany’ branded on his wings. Spare, O spare your innocent niece!”

“Edward, I never thought of it in that light!” cried Mrs. Tiffany; and she bent herself to furious crocheting. After a time, and when the Judge had resumed his book, she looked up and added:

“It might be worse, though, than a young man who had made it all himself.”

Judge Tiffany burst into laughter. Then, seeing her bend closer over her pink yarns, he grew grave, reached for the hand which held the needles, and kissed it.

That was her reward of childless matrimony, as the appreciation of her humors was his.

While they sat thus, in one of their comfortable hours, the guests were come. The Morses appeared first. He was a pleasant, hollow-chested little man; his delicacy of lung gave him his excuse for playing gentleman farmer. She, half-Spanish, carried bulk for the family and carried it well. The Andalusian showed in her coy yet open air, in her small, broad hand and foot, in a languorous liquidity of eye. Their son, a well-behaved and pretty youth of twelve, and their daughter, two years older, rode behind them on the back seat. The daughter bore one of those mosaic names with which the mixed race has sprinkled California Teresa del Vinal Morse. A pretty, delicate tea-rose thing, she stood at an age of divided appreciations. In the informal society of the Santa Lucia colony, she was listening half the time to her elders, taking a shadowy interest in their sayings and opinions; for the rest, she was turning on Theodore, that childish brother, an illuminated understanding.

The Goodyears arrived with a little flourish. Their trap, which she drove herself and which was perhaps a little too English to be useful or appropriate on a Californian road, the straight, tailor lines of her suit all displayed that kind of quiet, refined ostentation which, very possibly, shrieks as loud to God as the diamond rings on a soiled finger. Mrs. Tiffany, who had met the Morses on the lawn, tripped clear across the rose-border to meet the Goodyears; did it with entire unconsciousness of drawing any distinction. As by right, Mrs. Goodyear appropriated the great green arm-chair under the oak tree, from which throne she radiated a delicate patronage upon the company.

The others followed by twos and threes. Montgomery Lee, fresh-faced English University man, raising prunes on his patrimony of a younger son; the Roach girls, plump Californian old maids, and their pleasant little Yankee mother; the Ruggleses, a young married couple. Careless farmers, Mr. and Mrs. Ruggles; but they had the good nature which is the virtue of that defect. This, and the common interest in their three plump, mischievous babies, gave them general popularity in the colony.

Within five minutes, the company had followed the law of such middle-aged groups of familiars, and separated by sexes. The men drifted over to the piazza, lit cigars, hoisted their knees, and talked, first, of the prune picking, their trouble with help, the rather bootless effort of a group in San Jose to form a Growers’ Association; then of that city where lay their more vital interests.

Goodyear had just been to San Francisco on a flying trip; he brought back fresh gossip: The Bohemian Club had the “Jinks” in rehearsal; a new-discovered poet had written the book; it was to be (so the Sire declared) the greatest in club history.

“As usual,” smiled Judge Tiffany.

They were saying about the Pacific Union Club that the Southern Pacific had raised its rates to Southern points. One might have sensed that shadow which hangs always over commercial California in the sombreness which froze the group at this news. From five minutes of pessimistic discussion, Goodyear led them by a scattered fire of personalities. Billy Darnton was going to give a bull’s head breakfast at San Jacinto. Al Hemphill was coming to it all the way from New York. Charlie Bates had pulled out for the new gold diggings in the Mojave desert, rich again in anticipation, although he had to leave San Francisco secretly to escape the process servers.

“Tea, gentlemen!” called Mrs. Tiffany, from her nasturtium bower in the shadow of the great oak.

“Just when we are getting comfortable,” her husband growled pleasantly; and he made no move to rise. The women sat at ease about the tea-table. Their talk, beginning with the marvelous Ruggles babies, had run lightly past clothes and help, and fallen into the hands of Mrs. Goodyear. She, too, was full of San Francisco. Apart, under the grape arbor, Teresa Morse and her brother were snaring lizards playing like two well-behaved babies miraculously grown tall.

“There’s Eleanor,” suddenly spoke Teresa. At the word, she dropped her lizard, started forward; and stopped as she came out into full view of the road.

Eleanor, in fresh white, bareheaded under her parasol, was approaching between two young men. The slighter of the two men moved a little apart; the heavier, in whom Mrs. Tiffany recognized with some apprehension the new protege, Mr. Bertram Chester, walked very close up. He was peering under the parasol, which Eleanor dropped in his direction from time to time without visibly effecting his removal. It seemed from his wide gestures, from the smile which became apparent as he drew nearer, that he was talking ardently.

In the other man, Mrs. Tiffany recognized that Mr. Heath who had the boy friendship with Bertram Chester. He was putting in a word now and then, it appeared. When he spoke, Eleanor turned polite attention upon him; and then resumed her guarded attitude toward that dynamo buzzing at her left. Insensible of the company on the lawn, they passed behind the grape arbor which fringed the gate and which hid them temporarily from view; and the one-sided conversation became audible.

“It wasn’t a patch on fights I’ve had with ’em. Down home, I used to fight steers right along. That’s nothing to a nigger who used to work for us in Tulare. He’d jump on their backs and reach over and bite their noses till they hollered quits. Sure thing he did!” It died out as they turned in at the gate and faced the group about the trees.

Mrs. Goodyear made a gesture of an imaginary lorgnette toward her high-bridged nose. Mrs. Tiffany gathered herself and ran over to the gate. It was Mr. Heath she noticed as she advanced who was blushing. Bertram Chester stood square on his two feet smiling genially. As for Eleanor, she maintained that sweet inscrutability of face which became, as years and trouble came on, her great and unappreciated personal asset.

Young Chester spoke first:

“I knew Miss Gray was coming down this afternoon so I laid for her on the road didn’t I, Miss Gray?”

“Very nice of you, I’m sure,” murmured Mrs. Tiffany, though she bit her lip before she spoke “won’t you come over to meet our friends?” Eleanor had darted ahead, to the pats of the women and the adoring hugs of Teresa Morse.

Mrs. Tiffany saw with relief that her disgraced protege managed his end of the introduction very well, although he did make a slight advance to shake hands with the critical Mrs. Goodyear. He gave no sign to show that he perceived the men over on the piazza. Mr. Heath, his Fidus Achates, cast a slight glance in their direction; then, seeing Bertram settle himself down in an arm-chair and begin at once to address Mrs. Goodyear, he sat down likewise, suffused with an air of young embarrassment. Mrs. Ruggles, seated next to him, began with visible tact the effort to put him at his ease.

Mr. Chester, as he talked to Mrs. Goodyear, looked always toward Eleanor. She, helping Mrs. Tiffany with the tea things, turning a caressing word now and then toward Teresa Morse, might not have noticed, for all her expression showed.

The men came over for tea, were introduced. Mrs. Tiffany, in her foolish anxiety for the manners and appearance of her protege, noted that he was at home with men, at least.

Mr. Goodyear, indeed, clutched with his eye at the blue-and-gold button in the lapel of Bertram’s coat, at the figure of him, and at the name.

“You aren’t Chester who played tackle on the Berkeley Varsity last season?” he asked. An old Harvard oar, Goodyear kept up his interest in athletics.

“Tackle and half,” said the youth. “Yes, sir.”

“Well, well, I remember you in the game!” said Goodyear.

Mrs. Tiffany, now that her protege no longer needed watching, had returned to her tea things.

“Eleanor,” she called. “Will you run into the house and get that box of chocolate wafers that’s over the ice chest?”

“Let me carry ’em for you, Miss Gray,” put in Chester, breaking through a college reminiscence of Goodyear’s.

Eleanor never flicked an eyelash as she announced:

“I should be very glad.”

Tiffany, glancing over the group, noted with comparative relief that none but she, Goodyear, and the young persons involved, had heard this passage.

As they moved toward the house, Bertram opened upon Miss Gray at once.

“This is the second chance I’ve had alone at you,” he said.

“We are rather conspicuous,” she burst out.

“Oh, nobody’ll mind. A girl always thinks everybody is looking at her. Besides, I wouldn’t care if they were. I’ve wanted to tell you something, and I couldn’t with Heath trailing us. You’ve got awfully nice eyes.”

Eleanor seemed to see neither the necessity nor the convenience of an answer.

“But you have!” he persisted. “They’re better than pretty. They’re nice.”

Again Eleanor said nothing. It seemed to her that there was nothing to say.

“I know why you’ve got it in for me,” he burst out. “You have, you know. When I speak to you, you never talk back, and yesterday you wouldn’t let me stay after I had corralled the bull. It’s because I’m working for your uncle. It’s because I’m making a living, not eating what someone else made for me like ” he swept his hand backward toward the company on the lawn “like those people out there.”

Stung, for a second, to a visible emotion, Eleanor raised her grey eyes and regarded him.

“You are assuming a little, aren’t you?” said she.

“Then why can’t I come to see you sometime in the evening if that isn’t so? I don’t ask it of many nice girls.”

She caught at the delimiting phrase, “nice girls,” and glanced up again. By this time, they had passed through the living room; and he had awkwardly opened the door into the kitchen.

“I haven’t known you very long,” she said.

“There isn’t a lot to know about me,” he grumbled. Then his face cleared like the sunshine breaking through. “I could teach you to savvey the whole works in an evening.”

“There are the chocolate wafers up over the ice-chest that brown tin box.” He reached up and heaved the package down, putting into that simple and easy operation the energy of one lifting a trunk.

Annoyed, and a little amused, Eleanor watched him. All at once, she felt a catch in her throat, was aware of a vague, uncomprehended fear fear of him, of her loneliness with him, of something further and greater which she could not understand, did not try to understand. She wanted air; wanted to get away. When he turned about, she stood holding open the kitchen door, her eyes averted.

She felt that he was standing over her; she felt his smile as he looked down.

“You needn’t be in such a terrible hurry,” he said.

“They’ll be waiting for us on the lawn,” she forced herself to answer. It required all her energy to keep her voice clear and firm. Then she hurried ahead into the open air. Once in sight of the lawn party, she made herself walk beside him, even smile up at him.

“It’s just as I said ” he had gone back to his grumbling voice and his wholly presumptuous manner “Either you don’t like me, or you’re sore on me because I’m working for your uncle.”

To the great relief of Eleanor, Mrs. Tiffany came out to meet them, took the box from Bertram and accompanied them back to the tea table. For the rest of the afternoon, Eleanor managed by one device or another to save the situation. When, in the shifting of group and group, she had no one else for protection, Teresa Morse, following her like a dog, ready to come to her side at a glance, played the involuntary chaperone.

Judge Tiffany had no word alone with his wife until the sun slanted low across the orchard and the company broke up. When he met her apart, he said:

“He ought to be a success, that protege of yours!”

“I have been dreadfully mortified!”

“Oh, not a social success, though that may come too, if he ever perceives the necessity for it. But a general success. Such simple and unturned directness as his ought to win out anywhere. It is more than enchanting. It is magnificent. I’m willing to risk discipline on the place just to study a specimen so unusual. Mattie, this time I am going to assist. I’m going to ask him to supper.”

“Edward, are you laughing at me again?”

“For once, my dear, no; not at least on the main line. You’d better ask that Mr. Heath, too.”

“And Eleanor?”

The Judge looked across to the oak tree, where Eleanor was ostentatiously tying up the brown braids of Teresa Morse. Bertram, talking athletics with Goodyear, had her under fire of his eyes.

“If any young person was ever capable to make that choice, it is your niece Eleanor,” he said. “It might afford study. Yes, ask her, too.”

Mr. Chester and Mr. Heath were delighted; though Mr. Chester said that he had an engagement for the evening. ("What engagement except with the cutting-women?” thought Mattie Tiffany.) But Eleanor declined. Some of the chickens were sick; she was afraid that it might be the pip; she doubted if Antonio or Maria would attend to it; she would sup at home. Mrs. Tiffany, anticipating the intention which she saw in Bertram’s eyes, made a quick draft on her tact and asked:

“Mr. Chester, would you mind helping me in with the chairs?”

Seated at the supper table, Bertram Chester expanded. The Judge took him in hand at once; led him on into twenty channels of introspective talk. Presently, they were speaking direct to one another, the gulf that separates youth from age, employer from employed, bridged by interest on one side and supreme confidence on the other. This grouping left Mrs. Tiffany free to study Heath. It grew upon her that she had overlooked him and his needs through her interest in the more obvious Chester. She noticed with approval his finished table manners. Mr. Chester, though he understood the proper use of knife and fork and napkin, paid slight attention to “passing things”; Heath, on the contrary, was alert always, and especially to her needs. “He had a careful mother,” she thought. Gently, and with a concealed approach, she led him on to his family and his worldly circumstances. He spoke freely and simply, and with a curious frank assumption that anything his people chose to do was right, because they did it. He had come down to the University from Tacoma; his father kept a wagon repair shop. His people had gone too heavily into the land boom, and lost everything.

“I felt that I could work my way through Berkeley or Stanford more easily than through an Eastern college,” he said simply.

“And then I shouldn’t be so far away from home. Mother likes to see me at least once a year.”

He was going home after the apricot picking was over; he felt that in vacation he should earn at least his fare to Washington and back.

“I’m sure she must be a very good mother to deserve that devotion,” said Mrs. Tiffany, warming to him.

“She deserves more,” he said, a kind of inner glow rising to his white-and-pink boyish face. That same glow, Mrs. Tiffany might have noticed this and did not illuminated him whenever, from across the table, Chester’s laugh or his energetic crack on a sentence called a forced attention. Mr. Heath deferred always to this louder personality; kept for him the anxious and eager interest of a mother toward her young. Gradually, this interest absorbed both Mr. Heath and Mrs. Tiffany. The table talk became a series of monologues by young Bertram Chester, Judge Tiffany throwing in just enough replies to spur and guide him.

“No, I don’t belong to any fraternity,” said the confident youth, “don’t believe in them. They plenty beat me for football captain last year too. When I came to college, they didn’t want me. After I made the team and got prominent, they began to rush me. Then I didn’t want them.”

“It might have been easier for Bert if he had joined them,” said Heath. “They don’t like to have their members working at with their hands; they always find them snap jobs if they are poor and prominent.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Bertram. “The barbs elected me business manager of the Occident last season I didn’t make the team until I was a Sophomore, you know and that more than paid my way. This year I’ve got a billiard hall with Sandy McCusick.

“He used to be a trainer for the track team,” explained Bertram. “I steer him custom and he runs it. Ought to get me through next year over and above. That’s one reason I’m picking fruit and resting my mind this summer instead of hustling for money in the city.”

“And then?” asked the Judge.

“Law, I guess.”

“I am an attorney myself.”

“I guess I know that!”

“What school have you chosen?”

“None, I guess. I don’t want to afford the time. Yes, I know you want good preparation, but I’d rather be preparing in an office, making a little and keeping my eye open for chances. I may find, before my three years are up, that it isn’t law I want, but business.”

“I’m not a college man myself,” said the Judge, “I got my education by reading nights on the farm, and pounded out what law I knew in an office at Virginia City. One didn’t need a great deal of law to practice in Comstock days more nerve and mining sense. But I’ve regretted always that I didn’t have a more thorough preparation. Still, every man to his own way. This may be best for you.”

“That’s what I think,” said Bertram Chester. “When I got through High School in Tulare, Dad said, ’Unless you want to stay on the ranch, you’d better foot it for college.’ I didn’t want to ranch it, and I saw that college must be the best place for a start. Dad put up for the first year. I might have stretched it out to cover a little of my Sophomore year if I’d been careful. I was a pretty fresh Freshman,” he added.

“And your mother?” asked Mrs. Tiffany. “I suppose she was crazy for you to go.”

“Yes, I suppose she would have been. She’s been dead ten years. How hard is it to get into a law office in San Francisco?” he added, shifting.

Judge Tiffany met the direct hint with a direct parry.

“We have five thousand attorneys in San Francisco and only five hundred of them are making a living.”

“Yes, I know it is overcrowded,” said Bertram Chester, not a particle abashed.

After black coffee on the piazza, the two college boys swung off down the lane, Bertram smoking rapidly at one of the Judge’s cigars.

“He can be almost anything,” said the Judge, meditatively.

“Even a gentleman?” gently inquired Mrs. Tiffany.

“Perhaps that isn’t necessary in our Western way of life. Thank God, we haven’t come yet to the point where the caste of Vere de Vere is necessary to us.”

“I wish I had it,” he went on, a little wistfully.

“Gentility? why Edward, if anyone ”

“Oh no, my dear. I may say that was half the trouble. So many considerations came up; so many things I didn’t want to do, so many it didn’t seem right to do. I was forever turning aside to wrestle with my feelings on those things, and forever hesitating. Half the time, after the opportunity was gone by, I discovered that my scruples had been foolish; but I always discovered afterward. I don’t believe that success lies that way in a new world.”

He had risen; and now his wife rose and stood beside him.

“You are forever talking as though you were a failure. I know you’re not. Everyone knows you’re not.”

“The parable of the ten talents, Mattie. Not how much we’ve got, but how much interest we’ve earned on our powers. However, we had that out long ago, my dear. Yes, I know. I promised not to talk and think this way. But if I’d been like this boy! He’ll seize the thing before him. No side considerations in his mind!”

“It is a policy,” said Mrs. Tiffany in a tone of injured partisanship, “that will land him in jail.”

“No,” said the Judge, “success does not lead towards jails. He’ll look out for that.”