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.