Street, the social trimmings were hastily added
in Fifth Avenue; and the union between them was as monstrous and
factitious, as unlike the gradual homogeneous growth which flowers
into what other countries know as society, as that between the Blois
gargoyles on Peter Van Degen's roof and the skeleton walls supporting
them.

That was what "they" had always said; what, at least, the Dagonet
attitude, the Dagonet view of life, the very lines of the furniture in
the old Dagonet house expressed. Ralph sometimes called his mother and
grandfather the Aborigines, and likened them to those vanishing denizens
of the American continent doomed to rapid extinction with the advance of
the invading race. He was fond of describing Washington Square as the
"Reservation," and of prophesying that before long its inhabitants would
be exhibited at ethnological shows, pathetically engaged in the exercise
of their primitive industries.

Small, cautious, middle-class, had been the ideals of aboriginal New
York; but it suddenly struck the young man that they were singularly
coherent and respectable as contrasted with the chaos of indiscriminate
appetites which made up its modern tendencies. He too had wanted to be
"modern," had revolted, half-humorously, against the restrictions and
exclusions of the old code; and it must have been by one of the ironic
reversions of heredity that, at this precise point, he began to see what
there was to be said on the other side--his side, as he now felt it to
be.

VI

Upstairs, in his brown firelit room, he threw himself into an armchair,
and remembered... Harvard first--then Oxford; then a year of wandering
and rich initiation. Returning to New York, he had read law, and now
had his desk in the office of the respectable firm in whose charge the
Dagonet estate had mouldered for several generations. But his profession
was the least real thing in his life. The realities lay about him now:
the books jamming his old college bookcases and overflowing on chairs
and tables; sketches too--he could do charming things, if only he had
known how to finish them!--and, on the writing-table at his elbow,
scattered sheets of prose and verse; charming things also, but, like the
sketches, unfinished.

Nothing in the Dagonet and Marvell tradition was opposed to this
desultory dabbling with life. For four or five generations it had been
the rule of both houses that a young fellow should go to Columbia or
Harvard, read