business" only;
and we, by a common instinct, artlessly joining hands, went forth into
the wilderness without so much as a twinkling taper.

Our consensus, on all this ground, was amazing--it brooked no exception;
the word had been passed, all round, that we didn't, that we couldn't
and shouldn't, understand these things, questions of arithmetic and of
fond calculation, questions of the counting-house and the market; and we
appear to have held to our agreement as loyally and to have accepted our
doom as serenely as if our faith had been mutually pledged. The rupture
with my grandfather's tradition and attitude was complete; we were never
in a single case, I think, for two generations, guilty of a stroke of
business; the most that could be said of us was that, though about
equally wanting, all round, in any faculty of acquisition, we happened
to pay for the amiable weakness less in some connections than in others.
The point was that we moved so oddly and consistently--as it was our
only form of consistency--over our limited pasture, never straying to
nibble in the strange or the steep places. What was the matter with us
under this spell, and what the moral might have been for our case, are
issues of small moment, after all, in face of the fact of our mainly so
brief duration. It was given to but few of us to be taught by the event,
to be made to wonder with the last intensity what _had_ been the matter.
This it would be interesting to worry out, might I take the time; for
the story wouldn't be told, I conceive, by any mere rueful glance at
other avidities, the preference for ease, the play of the passions, the
appetite for pleasure. These things have often accompanied the business
imagination; just as the love of life and the love of other persons, and
of many of the things of the world, just as quickness of soul and sense,
have again and again not excluded it. However, it comes back, as I have
already hinted, to the manner in which the "things of the world" could
but present themselves; there were not enough of these, and they were
not fine and fair enough, to engage happily so much unapplied, so much
loose and crude attention. We hadn't doubtless at all a complete play of
intelligence--if I may not so far discriminate as to say _they_ hadn't;
or our lack of the instinct of the market needn't have been so much
worth speaking of: other curiosities, other sympathies might have
redressed the balance. I make out our young co