n. It was odd that the conservative
training, the rigid traditions of his family, conventional,
old-fashioned, Puritanical, as became the best stock of New York, a stock
that in the Ruyler family had seemed to carry its own antidote for the
poisons ever seeking entrance to the spiritual conduits of the rich, had
left any place for that sentimental romantic tide in his nature which had
swept him into marriage with a girl outside of his own class; a girl of
whose family he had known practically nothing until his outraged father
had cabled to a correspondent in Paris to make investigation of the
Perrin family of Rouen, to which the girl's mother claimed to belong.

The inquiries were satisfactory; they were quite respectable,
bourgeois, silk merchants in a small way--although at least two strata
below that haute bourgeoisie which now regarded itself as the real
upper class of the Republique Francaise. A true Ruyler, however, would
have fled at the first danger signal, never have reached the point
where inquiries were in order.

California was replete with charming, beautiful, and superlatively
healthy girls; the climate produced them as it did its superabundance of
fruit, flowers, and vegetables. But they had left Price Ruyler
untroubled. He had been far more interested watching San Francisco rise
from its ruins, transformed almost overnight from a picturesque but
ramshackle city, a patchwork of different eras, into a staid metropolis
of concrete and steel, defiant alike of earthquake and fire. He had liked
the new experience of being a pioneer, which so subtly expanded his
starved ego that he had, by unconscious degrees, made up his mind to
remain out here as the permanent head of the San Francisco House; and in
time, no doubt, marry one of these fine, hardy, frank, out-of-door,
wholly unsubtle California girls. Moreover, he had found in San Francisco
several New Yorkers as well as Englishmen of his own class--notably John
Gwynne, who had thrown over one of the greatest of English peerages to
follow his personal tastes in a legislative career--all of whom had
settled down into that free and independent life from motives not
dissimilar from his own.

But he had ceased to be an untroubled spirit from the moment he met
Helene Delano. He had gone down to Monterey for polo, and he had
forgotten the dinner to which he had brought a keen appetite, and stared
at her as she entered the immense dining room with her mother.

It