The novel opens with a cuckoo clock striking nine in the Bessemer dining room, a detail that immediately establishes the household's rhythms. Victorine, the servant, brings in halved watermelon and retrieves the Sunday paper, while the family straggles to breakfast. The view from the rear window—San Francisco Bay, Mount Diablo, the Golden Gate—is described with topographical specificity, anchoring the story in a real geography. Mr. Bessemer, a small round man in a skull-cap, talks to himself in a running half-whisper about winding his watch and finding a spoon. He is 'abstracted, self-centred,' with hobbies in homoeopathy and clock mechanisms, and refers to his ten-year-old son as 'that boy.' This opening establishes a domestic realism grounded in mundane routines and precise observation.

A Father's Peculiarities

Mr. Bessemer is introduced as 'one of those men who seem entirely disassociated from their families.' His paternal instincts assert themselves only on 'rare and intense occasions.' At table he talks little, and his eldest daughter is 'a puzzle and a stranger to him.' His habit of muttering a running commentary on his own actions—'Nine o'clock—the clock's a little fast. I think I'll wind my watch'—gives him a comic, self-absorbed quality. The catalog subject 'Manners and customs' finds concrete expression here: the Sunday breakfast is a 'movable feast,' the week-day regime deranged. Norris uses these small behavioral details to sketch character without explicit judgment. The father's hobbies—homoeopathy and clockwork—are not mere quirks but structural elements: the cuckoo clock that opens the chapter, and his later talk of winding, tie his character to the household's temporal order.

Matchmaking as a Game

Condy and Blix take an active role in pairing off a couple they call 'K. D. B. and Captain Jack.' After a meeting at a restaurant, they follow the pair through the streets, observing from a half-block behind. Blix exclaims, 'Othello and Desdemona. They're getting on,' and Condy worries, 'We've been playing a game of checkers with human souls.' The language of games and responsibility—'arbiters of their fate'—frames their intervention as both playful and morally ambiguous. The excerpt shows them tracking the couple to a house near Washington Square, where the captain bows 'with great deference, his hat in his hand.' Norris does not reveal the outcome; the matchmaking remains an episode of observation and speculation. The catalog subject 'Man-woman relationships' is here filtered through the protagonists' self-conscious meddling.

San Francisco as a Stage

The setting is not generic California but a precisely mapped San Francisco. The Bessemers live on Washington Street hill, 'almost at its very summit,' with a view that includes Mount Diablo, Oakland, Berkeley, Sausalito, Mount Tamalpais, the Golden Gate, and the Farrallone islands. Later, Condy and Blix walk toward Pacific Street, pass Washington Square with its Geodetic Survey stone and flagstaff, and stop near a 'commonplace little house, two doors above the Russian church with its minarets like inverted balloons.' These landmarks—real and named—ground the narrative in a specific urban geography. The catalog subject 'San Francisco (Calif.) — Fiction' is thus not merely a label but a structural element: the city provides both a visual backdrop and a network of streets that the characters navigate, their movements traced with the same precision as the breakfast routine.

Readers attentive to Norris's method will notice how he builds character through small, repeatable actions—Mr. Bessemer's muttering, Condy's worry, Blix's enthusiasm—rather than through interior monologue. The excerpts offer no resolution to the matchmaking plot; the novel's full arc remains unknown. What is evident is a writer who trusts concrete detail—a halved watermelon, a reading-glass, a bunch of wilting marguerites—to carry meaning. Approach the text as a series of precisely observed scenes rather than a tightly plotted romance.