Outside, the morning spread its blue-gold tail in wanton splendor.  February in San Francisco!  Fred Starratt drew in a deep breath and wondered where else in the whole world one could have bettered that morning at any season of the year.  Like most San Franciscans, he had never flown very far afield, but he was passionate in his belief that his native city “had it on any of them,” to use his precise term.  And he was resentful to a degree at any who dared in his presence to establish other claims or to even suggest another preference.  He looked forward to New York as an experience, but never as a goal.  No, San Francisco was good enough for him!

He felt the same conviction this morning, but a vague gypsying stirred his blood also, and a wayfaring urge swept him.  The sky was indescribably blue, washed clean by a moist January that had drenched the hills to lush-green life.  The bay lay in a sapphire drowse, flecked by idle-winged argosies, unfolding their storm-soaked sails to the caressing sunlight.  Soaring high above the placid gulls, an airplane circled and dipped like a huge dragon fly in nuptial flight.  Through the Golden Gate, shrouded in the delicate mists evoked by the cool night, an ocean liner glided with arrogant assurance.

From the last vantage point, before he slipped townward to his monotonous duties, Starratt stood, shading his eyes, watching the stately exit of this maritime giant.  This was a morning for starting adventure...for setting out upon a quest!...  He had been stirred before to such Homeric longings ... spring sunshine could always prick his blood with sharp-pointed desire.  But to-day there was a poignant melancholy in his flair for a wider horizon.  He was touched by weariness as well as longing.  He was like a pocket hunter whose previous borrowings had beguiled him with flashing grains that proved valueless.  He would not abandon his search, but he must pack up and move on to new, uncertain, unproved ground.  And he felt all the weight of hidden and heartbreaking perils with which his spiritual faring forth must of necessity be hedged.

At the corner of California and Montgomery streets he met the tide of nine-o’clock commuters surging toward the insurance offices and banks.  His widened vision suddenly contracted.  Middle class!  The phrase leaped forward from the flock mind which this standardized concourse diffused.  In many of the faces he read the potentialities of infinite variety, smothered by a dull mask of conformity.  What a relief if but one in that vast flood would go suddenly mad!  He tried fantastically to picture the effect upon the others—­the momentary cowardice and braveries that such an event would call into life.  For a few brief moments certain personalities and acts would stand out sharply glorified, like grains of dust dancing in the slanting rays of the sun.  Then, the angle of yellow light restored to white normality, the whirling particles would drift back into their colorless oblivion.