eir exchange of views
usually remained within the limits of a pensive dilettantism.

"The fact is, life isn't much a fit for either of us," Winsett had once
said. "I'm down and out; nothing to be done about it. I've got only
one ware to produce, and there's no market for it here, and won't be in
my time. But you're free and you're well-off. Why don't you get into
touch? There's only one way to do it: to go into politics."

Archer threw his head back and laughed. There one saw at a flash the
unbridgeable difference between men like Winsett and the
others--Archer's kind. Every one in polite circles knew that, in
America, "a gentleman couldn't go into politics." But, since he could
hardly put it in that way to Winsett, he answered evasively: "Look at
the career of the honest man in American politics! They don't want us."

"Who's 'they'? Why don't you all get together and be 'they'
yourselves?"

Archer's laugh lingered on his lips in a slightly condescending smile.
It was useless to prolong the discussion: everybody knew the melancholy
fate of the few gentlemen who had risked their clean linen in municipal
or state politics in New York. The day was past when that sort of
thing was possible: the country was in possession of the bosses and the
emigrant, and decent people had to fall back on sport or culture.

"Culture! Yes--if we had it! But there are just a few little local
patches, dying out here and there for lack of--well, hoeing and
cross-fertilising: the last remnants of the old European tradition that
your forebears brought with them. But you're in a pitiful little
minority: you've got no centre, no competition, no audience. You're
like the pictures on the walls of a deserted house: 'The Portrait of a
Gentleman.' You'll never amount to anything, any of you, till you roll
up your sleeves and get right down into the muck. That, or emigrate
... God! If I could emigrate ..."

Archer mentally shrugged his shoulders and turned the conversation back
to books, where Winsett, if uncertain, was always interesting.
Emigrate! As if a gentleman could abandon his own country! One could
no more do that than one could roll up one's sleeves and go down into
the muck. A gentleman simply stayed at home and abstained. But you
couldn't make a man like Winsett see that; and that was why the New
York of literary clubs and exotic restaurants, though a first shake
made it seem more of a kaleidoscope, turned out, in