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 swept him into marriage with a girl outside of his own class; a girl of whose family he had known practically nothing until his outraged father had cabled to a correspondent in Paris to make investigation of the Perrin family of Rouen, to which the girl's mother claimed to belong.
The inquiries were satisfactory; they were quite respectable, bourgeois, silk merchants in a small way--although at least two strata below that haute bourgeoisie which now regarded itself as the real upper class of the Republique Francaise.

A true Ruyler, however, would have fled at the first danger signal, never have reached the point where inquiries were in order.
California was replete with charming, beautiful, and superlatively healthy girls; the climate produced them as it did its superabundance of fruit, flowers, and vegetables.

But they had left Price Ruyler untroubled.