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