They plumed
themselves upon having discovered Gora Dwight and sometimes wondered how it
had happened.
But Bohemia is hardly a trades union; it is indeed anarchistic and knows
no boss. Gora might not be invited to Carmel this many a day, nor yet to
Berkeley, nor to sundry other parnassi, but there was one club in San
Francisco whose curiosity got the better of it, and she was invited to
be the guest of the evening at the home of the Seven Arts Club on the
twentieth of April in the fateful year of nineteen-fourteen.
VII
The Seven Arts Club had been organized by a group of painters, architects,
authors, sculptors, musicians, actors and poets, most of whom had long
since found various degrees of fame and moved to New York, Europe, or the
romantic wilderness.
It still had seventy times seven votaries of the seven arts on its list and
few had found fame as yet outside their hospitable state--where log-rolling
is as amiable as the climate--but all save the elders were expecting it and
many made a fair living. They met once a week, and a part of the evening
pleasure of the literary wing was to "place" authors. They were willing to
swallow the British authors whole (they did in fact "discover" one or
two of them, as the musical critics had discovered such a rara avis as
Tetrazzini, or the dramatic critics many a now famous player); but they
were excessively critical of all who owed their origin to the United States
of America, and particularly of those who had loved and lost the sovereign
state of California.
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