aturally inclined to adventure and irony, indulged in a boundless
liberty of appreciation. He began with being a young man of promise; at
Oxford he distinguished himself, to his father's ineffable satisfaction,
and the people about him said it was a thousand pities so clever a
fellow should be shut out from a career. He might have had a career
by returning to his own country (though this point is shrouded in
uncertainty) and even if Mr. Touchett had been willing to part with
him (which was not the case) it would have gone hard with him to put
a watery waste permanently between himself and the old man whom he
regarded as his best friend. Ralph was not only fond of his father,
he admired him--he enjoyed the opportunity of observing him. Daniel
Touchett, to his perception, was a man of genius, and though he himself
had no aptitude for the banking mystery he made a point of learning
enough of it to measure the great figure his father had played. It was
not this, however, he mainly relished; it was the fine ivory surface,
polished as by the English air, that the old man had opposed to
possibilities of penetration. Daniel Touchett had been neither at
Harvard nor at Oxford, and it was his own fault if he had placed in his
son's hands the key to modern criticism. Ralph, whose head was full
of ideas which his father had never guessed, had a high esteem for the
latter's originality. Americans, rightly or wrongly, are commended for
the ease with which they adapt themselves to foreign conditions; but Mr.
Touchett had made of the very limits of his pliancy half the ground
of his general success. He had retained in their freshness most of
his marks of primary pressure; his tone, as his son always noted with
pleasure, was that of the more luxuriant parts of New England. At the
end of his life he had become, on his own ground, as mellow as he
was rich; he combined consummate shrewdness with the disposition
superficially to fraternise, and his "social position," on which he had
never wasted a care, had the firm perfection of an unthumbed fruit. It
was perhaps his want of imagination and of what is called the historic
consciousness; but to many of the impressions usually made by English
life upon the cultivated stranger his sense was completely closed. There
were certain differences he had never perceived, certain habits he had
never formed, certain obscurities he had never sounded. As regards these
latter, on the day he had sounded them h