The Avalanche | Page 5

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
Hélène 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 naïve 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.
When he met her eyes some twenty minutes later, he dismissed the
impression of subtlety, for their black depths were quick with an eager
wonder and curiosity. Later they grew wistful, and he guessed that she
knew none of these smart folk, down, like himself, for the tournament;
people who were chattering from table to table like a large family. That
some of his girl acquaintances were interested in the young stranger he
inferred from speculative and appraising eyes that were turned upon her
from time to time.
Price, with some irony, wondered at their curiosity. The San Francisco
girl, he had discovered, possessed an extra sense all her own. There was
no lofty indifference about her. She had the worth-while stranger
detected and tabulated and his or her social destiny settled before the
Eastern train had disgorged its contents at the Oakland mole. And even
the immense florid mother of this lovely girl, with her own masses of
snow white hair dressed in a manner becoming her age, and a severe
gown of black Chantilly net, relieved by the merest trifle of jet, looked
the reverse of the nondescript tourist. The girl wore white embroidered
silk muslin and a thin gold chain with a small ruby pendant. She was
rather above the average height, although not as tall as her mother, and

if she were as thin as fashion commanded, her bones were so small that
her neck and arms looked almost plump. Her expressive eyes were as
black as her hair, and her only large feature. Her skin was of a quite
remarkably pink whiteness, although there was a pink color in her lips
and cheeks. The older men stared at her more persistently than the
younger ones, who liked their own sort and not girls who looked as if
they might be "booky" and "spring things on a fellow."
There was a ball in the evening and once more mother and daughter sat
apart, while the flower of San Francisco--an