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 deuce