Traveling she had read modern novels for the first time. There were many

in the ship's library, oh, but dozens! and she knew now how American and

English girls enjoyed life. Her mother had been ill nearly all the way

over. She had given her word not to speak to any one, but maman had been

ignorant of the library replete with the novelists of the day, and

although she was not 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.




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