The men of his family had never been idlers since the recrudescence of

ancestral 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 expression. 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.




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