The Avalanche | Page 9

be an old cabbage."
But it had been heaven to dance with a young man who was not a
cousin; and to sit out alone with him in the moonlight, Oh, grace à
Dieu!
Traveling she had read modern novels for the first time. There were
many in the ship's library, oh, but dozens! and she knew now how
American and English girls enjoyed life. Her mother had been ill nearly
all the way over. She had given her word 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