"I am sorry to say you draw a blank, Gay," she informed him lightly. "I'm not in the market yet. Many a man has expected me to become domesticated at sight, and settle down in content over the cookstove. But I haven't even a past yet--nothing but a rather tame present and hope for a future. I don't seem to see you in it, Gay. In fact, there's nobody visible to the naked eye at present."
"Well," he said, "I'll cut it out for now, as long as I can't make good, but sometime you'll come to me and beg me to marry you, see if you don't. Whenever you get ready, I'll be right there with the goods."
Fancy laughed and the episode was closed.
"Say, Fancy, there's a gang of artist chaps and literary guys I'd like to put you up against," Gay said one afternoon. "I think you'd make a hit with the bunch, if you can stand a little jollying."
"You watch me!" Fancy became enthusiastically interested. "Where do they hang out?"
"They eat at a joint down on Montgomery Street. They're heavy joshers, though. They're too clever for me, mostly. It's the real-thing Bohemia down there, though."
"Why didn't you tell me about it before?" she pouted. "I'm game! Let's float in there to-night and see the animals feed."
So they went down to the Latin Quarter together.
Bohemia has been variously described. Since Henri Murger's time, the definition has changed retrogressively, until now, what is commonly called Bohemia is a place where one is told, "This is Liberty Hall!"--and one is forced to drink beer whether one likes it or not, where not to like spaghetti is a crime. Not such was the little coterie of artists, writers and amateurs, who dined together every night at Fulda's restaurant.
In San Francisco is recruited a perennial crop of such petty soldiers of fortune. Here art receives scant recompense, and as soon as one gets one's head above water and begins to be recognized, existence is unendurable in a place where genius has no field for action. The artist, the writer or the musician must fly East to the great market-place, New York, or to the great forcing-bed, Paris, to bloom or fade, to live or die in competition with others in his field.
So the little artistic colonies shrink with defections or increase with the accession of hitherto unknown aspirants. Many go and never return. A few come back to breathe again the stimulating air of California, to see with new eyes its fresh, vivid color, its poetry, its romance. To have gone East and to have returned without abject failure is here, in the eyes of the vulgar, Art's patent of nobility. Of those who have been content to linger peaceably in the land of the lotus, some are earls without coronets, but one and all share a fierce, hot, passionate love of the soil. San Francisco has become a fetish, a cult. Under its blue skies and driving fogs is bred the most ardent loyalty in these United States. San Francisco is most magnificently herself of any American city, and San Franciscans, in consequence, are themselves with an abounding perfervid sincerity. Faults they have, lurid, pungent, staccato, but hypocrisy is not of them. That vice is never necessary.