The Avalanche | Page 4

against his windows and the wind howled
about the exposed angles of his house with that personal fury of assault
with which storms brewed out in the vast wastes of the Pacific deride
the enthusiastic baptism of a too confident explorer. All he could see of
the bay was a mad race of white caps, and dark blurs which only
memory assured him were rocky storm-beaten islands; mountain tops,
so geological tradition ran, whose roots were in an unquiet valley long
since dropped from mortal gaze.
The waves were leaping high against the old forts at the entrance to the
Golden Gate, and occasionally he saw a small craft drift perilously near
to the rocks. But he loved the wild weather of San Francisco, for he
was by nature an imaginative man and he liked to think that he would
have followed the career of letters had not the traditions of the great
commercial house of Ruyler and Sons, forced him to carry on the
burden.
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.
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 République Française. 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