law, and then lapse into more or less cultivated inaction.
The only essential was that he should live "like a gentleman"--that is,
with a tranquil disdain for mere money-getting, a passive openness to
the finer sensations, one or two fixed principles as to the quality of
wine, and an archaic probity that had not yet learned to distinguish
between private and "business" honour.

No equipment could more thoroughly have unfitted the modern youth for
getting on: it hardly needed the scribbled pages on the desk to complete
the hopelessness of Ralph Marvell's case. He had accepted the fact with
a humorous fatalism. Material resources were limited on both sides of
the house, but there would always be enough for his frugal wants--enough
to buy books (not "editions"), and pay now and then for a holiday dash
to the great centres of art and ideas. And meanwhile there was the world
of wonders within him. As a boy at the sea-side, Ralph, between tides,
had once come on a cave--a secret inaccessible place with glaucous
lights, mysterious murmurs, and a single shaft of communication with the
sky. He had kept his find from the other boys, not churlishly, for he
was always an outspoken lad, but because he felt there were things about
the cave that the others, good fellows as they all were, couldn't be
expected to understand, and that, anyhow, it would never be quite his
cave again after he had let his thick-set freckled cousins play smuggler
and pirate in it.

And so with his inner world. Though so coloured by outer impressions,
it wove a secret curtain about him, and he came and went in it with
the same joy of furtive possession. One day, of course, some one would
discover it and reign there with him--no, reign over it and him. Once or
twice already a light foot had reached the threshold. His cousin Clare
Dagonet, for instance: there had been a summer when her voice had
sounded far down the windings... but he had run over to Spain for the
autumn, and when he came back she was engaged to Peter Van Degen, and
for a while it looked black in the cave. That was long ago, as time is
reckoned under thirty; and for three years now he had felt for her only
a half-contemptuous pity. To have stood at the mouth of his cave, and
have turned from it to the Van Degen lair--!

Poor Clare repented, indeed--she wanted it clearly but she repented in
the Van Degen diamonds, and the Van Degen motor bore her broken heart
from opera to ball. She had been s