t untruthful, _enfin_, she saw no reason to ask her
too anxious parent for another prohibition and condemn herself to yawn
at the sea.

Ruyler proposed at the end of a week. She was the only really innocent,
unspoiled, unselfconscious girl he had ever met, almost as old-fashioned
as his great grandmother must have been. Not that he set forth her
virtues to bolster his determination to marry a girl of no family even in
her own country; he was madly in love, and life without her was
unthinkable; but he tabulated the thousand points to her credit for the
benefit of his outraged father.

He did not pretend to like Madame Delano. She was a hard, calculating,
sordid old bourgeoisie, but when he refused the little _dot_ she would
have settled upon Helene, he knew that he had won her friendship and that
she would give him no trouble. She was not a mother-in-law to be ashamed
of, for her manners were coldly correct, her education in youth had
evidently been adequate, and in her obese way she was imposing. She gave
him to understand that she had no more desire to live with her son-in-law
than he with her, and established herself in a small suite in the Palace
Hotel. After a "lifetime" in a provincial town, economizing mercilessly,
she felt, she remarked in one of her rare expansive moments, that she had
earned the right to look on at life in a great hotel.

The rainy season she spent in Southern California, moving from one large
hotel crowded with Eastern visitors to another. This uncommon
self-indulgence and her devotion to Helene were the only weak spots
Ruyler was able to discover in that cast-iron character. She seldom
attended the brilliant entertainments of her daughter and refused the
endowed car offered by her son-in-law. Helene married to the best _parti_
in San Francisco and quite happy, she seemed content to settle down into
the role of the onlooker at the kaleidoscope of life. She spent eight
hours of the day and evening seated in an arm chair in the court of the
Palace Hotel, and for air rode out to the end of the California Street
car line, always on the front seat of the dummy. She was dubbed a "quaint
old party" by her new acquaintances and left to her own devices. If she
didn't want them they could jolly well do without her.

VI

Helene's social success was immediate and permanent. Californians rarely
do things by halves. Society was no exception. She had "walked off" with
the most desirable man in town, b