The Avalanche | Page 9

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 Hélène, 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 Hélène 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. Hélène 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.
VI
Hélène's social success was immediate and permanent. Californians rarely do things by halves. Society was no exception. She had "walked off" with the most desirable man in town, but 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 Hélène's rapidly expanding mind as companionable as he had hoped; and the girlish dignity she never lost, for all her naiveté 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 Hélène 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