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 was not her beauty, although that was considerable, that had summarily

transposed his gallant if cool admiration for all charming well bred

women into a submerging recognition of woman in particular; it was her

unlikeness to any of the girls he had been riding, dancing, playing golf

and tennis with during the past year and a half (for two years after his

arrival he had seen nothing of society whatever). Later that evening he

defined this dissimilarity from the American girl as the result not only

of her French blood but of her European training, her quiet secluded

girlhood in a provincial town of great beauty, where she had received a

leisurely education rare in the United States, seen or read little of the

great world (she had visited Paris only twice and briefly), her mind

charmingly developed by conscientious tutors. But at the moment he

thought that the compelling power lay in some deep subtlety of eye, her

little air of lofty aloofness, her classic small features in a small

face, and the top-heavy masses of blue black hair which she carried with

a certain naive pride as if it were her only vanity; in her general

unlikeness to the gray-eyed fair-haired American--a type to which himself

belonged. Her only point in common with this fashionable set patronizing

Del Monte for the hour, was the ineffable style with which she wore her

perfect little white frock; an American inheritance, he assumed after he

knew her; for, as he recalled provincial French women, style was not

their strong point.




readonlinefreebook.com Copyright 2016 - 2024