Starratt had often thought, as he lingered before the old picket fences, in an attempt to revive his memories of other days.  He could not remember, of course, quite back to the time when the Hyde Street hill had been in an opulent heyday, but the flavor of its quality had trickled through to his generation.  This was the section where his mother had languished in the prim gloom of her lamp-shaded parlor before his father’s discreet advances.  The house was gone ... replaced by a bay-windowed, jig-sawed horror of the ’80s, but the garden still smiled, its quaint fragrance reenforced at the proper season by the belated blossoms of a homesick and wind-bitten magnolia.  He was sure, judged by present-day standards, that his mother’s old home must have been a very modest, genial sort of place ... without doubt a clapboard, two-storied affair with a single wide gable and a porch running the full length of the front.  But, in a day when young and pretty women were at a premium, one did not have to live in a mansion to attract desirable suitors, and Fred Starratt had often heard his mother remind his father without bitterness of the catches that had been thrown her way.  Not that Starratt, senior, had been a bad prospect matrimonially.  Quite the contrary.  He had come from Boston in the early ’70s, of good substantial family, and with fair looks and a capacity for getting on.  Likewise, a chance for inside tips on the stock market, since he had elected to go in with a brokerage firm.  And so they were married, with all of conservative San Francisco at the First Unitarian Church to see the wedding, leavened by a sprinkling of the very rich and a dash of the ultrafashionable.  Unfortunately, the inside tips didn’t pan out ... absurd and dazzling fortune was succeeded by appalling and irretrievable failure.  Starratt, senior, was too young a man to succumb to the scurvy trick of fate, but he never quite recovered.  Gradually the Starratt family fell back a pace.  To the last there were certain of the old guard who still remembered them with bits of coveted pasteboard for receptions or marriages or anniversary celebrations ... but the Starratts became more and more a memory revived by sentiment and less and less a vital reality.

Fred Starratt used to speculate, during his nocturnal wandering among the shadows of his parents’ youthful haunts, just what his position would have been had these stock-market tips proved gilt edged.  He tried to imagine himself the master of a splendid estate down the peninsula—­preferably at Hillsboro—­possessed of high-power cars and a string of polo ponies ... perhaps even a steam yacht...  But these dazzling visions were not always in the ascendant.  There were times when a philanthropic dream moved him more completely and he had naive and varied speculations concerning the help that he could have placed in the way of the less fortunate had he been possessed of unlimited means.  Or, again, his hypothetical wealth put him in the way of the education that placed him easily at the top of a stirring profession.