ut they were good gamblers. When they
lost they paid. She had married into "their set." They had accepted her.
She was one of them. No secret order is more loyal to its initiates.

During that first year and a half of ideal happiness Ruyler, in what
leisure he could command, found Helene's rapidly expanding mind as
companionable as he had hoped; and the girlish dignity she never lost,
for all her naivete and vivacity, gratified his pride and compelled, upon
their second brief visit to New York, even the unqualified approval of
his family.

She had inherited all the subtle adaptability of her father's race,
nothing of the cold and rigid narrowness of her mother's class. Price had
feared that her lively mind might reveal disconcerting shallows, but
these little voids were but the divine hiatuses of youth. He sometimes
wondered just how strong her character was. There were times when she
showed a pronounced inclination for the line of least resistance ... but
her youth ... her too sheltered bringing up ... those drab cramped
years ... no wonder....

He was glad on the whole that his was the part to mold. Nevertheless, he
had his inconsistencies. Unlike many men of strong will and driving
purpose he liked strength of character and pronounced individuality in
women; and he, too, had had fleeting visions of what life might have been
had Flora Thornton entered life twenty years later. He had been quite
sincere in telling her that the young stranger reminded him of the most
powerful personality he had met in California, and he believed that
within a reasonable time Helene would be as variously cultivated, as
widely, if less erratically developed. But was there any such insurgent
force in her depths? It was not within the possibilities that at any time
in her life Flora Thornton had been pliable.

A man had little time to study his wife in California these days. Or at
any time? He sometimes wondered. Certainly happy marriages were rare and
divorces many. Fine weather nearly all the year round played the deuce
with domesticity, and his business could not be neglected for the long
vacation abroad to which they both had looked forward so ardently.

Sometimes, even before this vague gray mist had risen between them, he
had had moments of wondering whether he knew his wife at all. How could a
man know a woman who did not yet know herself? He sighed and wished he
had more time to explore the uncharted seas of a woman's soul.

Bu