ncestral energy in the person of Morgan Ruyler I; it was no part of
their profound sense of aristocracy to retire on inherited or invested
wealth; they believed that your fine American of the old stock should die
in harness; and if the harness had been fashioned and elaborated by
ancestors whose portraits hung in the Chamber of Commerce, all the more
reason to keep it spic and up to date instead of letting it lapse into
those historic vaults where so many once honored names lay rotting. They
were a hard, tight-fisted lot, the Ruylers, and Price in one secluded but
cherished wing of his mind was unlike them only because his mother was
the daughter of Masefield Price and would have been an artist herself if
her scandalized husband would have consented. Morgan Ruyler IV had
overlooked his father-in-law's divagation from the orthodox standards of
his own family because he had been a spectacular financial success;
bringing home ropes of enormous pearls from India in addition to the
fantastic sums paid him by enraptured native princes. But while Morgan
Ruyler believed that rich men should work and make their sons work, if
only because an idle class was both out of place in a republic and
conducive to unrest in the masses, it was quite otherwise with women.
They were for men to shelter, and it was their sole duty to be useful in
the home, and, wherever possible, ornamental in public. Nor had he the
least faith in female talent.

Marian Ruyler had yielded the point and departed hopefully for a broader
sphere when her second and favorite son was eight. Morgan Ruyler married
again as soon as convention would permit, this time carefully selecting a
wife of the soundest New York predispositions and with a personal
admiration of Queen Victoria; and he had watched young Price like an
affectionate but inexorable parent hawk until the young man followed his
brother--a quintessential Ruyler--into the now historic firm. However, he
suffered little from anxiety. Price, too, was conservative, intensely
proud of the family traditions, an almost impassioned worker, and
unselfish as men go. Two sons in every generation must enter the firm. It
was not in the Ruyler blood to take long chances.

III

Life out here in California had been too hurried for more than fleeting
moments of self-study, but on this idle Sunday morning Price Ruyler's
perturbed mind wandered to that inner self of his to which he once had
longed to give a freer expressio