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