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 clergy, helped rather than hurt their business.

Julia and Connie were early to-night, and took their regular places at a long table that was as yet surrounded only by empty chairs.  Madame, who was feeding bread and milk to a black-eyed three-year-old at a little table in a corner, nodded a welcome, and a young Frenchwoman, putting her head in through a swinging door at the back, nodded, too, and said, showing a double row of white teeth: 

“Wait—­een?”

“Yes, we’ll wait for the others!” Connie called back.  She and Julia nibbled French bread, and played with their knives and forks while they waited.

The dining-room had that aspect of having been made for domestic and adapted to general use that is so typically un-American, yet so dear to the American heart.  An American manager would have torn down partitions, papered in brown cartridge, curtained in pongee, and laid a hardwood floor.  Monsieur Montiverte left the two drawing-rooms as they were:  a shabby red carpet was under foot, stiff Nottingham curtains filtered the bright sunlight, and an old-fashioned paper in dull arabesques of green and brown and gold made a background for framed dark engravings, “Franklin at the Court of France,” and “The Stag at Bay,” and other pictures of their type.  The tablecloths were coarse, the china and glass heavy, and the menus were written in blue indelible pencil, in a curly French hand.  From the windows at the back one could look out upon an iron-railed balcony, a garden beyond, and the old, brick, balconied houses of the Chinese quarter.  At the left the California Street cable car climbed the hill, and the bell tower of old St. Mary’s rose sombre and dignified against the soft sunset sky.  At the right were the Park, with a home-going tide pouring through it at this hour, and Kearney Street with its jangling car bells, and below, the square roofs of the warehouse district, and the spire of the ferry building, and the bay framed in its rim of hills.  Montiverte owned the house in which he conducted his business; it was one of the oldest in the city, built by the French pioneers