nce. He wore excellent gray clothes of the same shade as his hair,
and out of this neutrality of tint his bright, brown eyes sparkled
piercingly.

He had begun life with the assumption that to be a New York Lanley was in
itself enough, a comfortable creed in which many of his relations had
obscurely lived and died. But before he was graduated from Columbia
College he began to doubt whether the profession of being an aristocrat
in a democracy was a man's job. At no time in his life did he deny the
value of birth and breeding; but he came to regard them as a
responsibility solemn and often irritating to those who did not possess
them, though he was no longer content with the current views of his
family that they were a sufficient attainment in themselves.

He was graduated from college in 1873, and after a summer at the family
place on the Hudson, hot, fertile, and inaccessible, which his sister
Alberta was at that time occupying, he had arranged a trip round the
world. September of that year brought the great panic, and swept away
many larger and solider fortunes than the Lanleys'. Mr. Lanley decided
that he must go to work, though he abandoned his traditions no further
than to study law. His ancestors, like many of the aristocrats of the
early days, had allowed their opinions of fashion to influence too much
their selection of real estate. All through the late seventies, while his
brothers and sisters were clinging sentimentally to brownstone fronts in
Stuyvesant Square or red-brick facades in Great Jones Street, Mr. Lanley
himself, unaffected by recollections of Uncle Joel's death or grandma's
marriage, had been parting with his share in such properties, and
investing along the east side of the park.

By the time he was forty he was once more a fairly rich man. He had left
the practice of law to become the president of the Peter Stuyvesant Trust
Company, for which he had been counsel. After fifteen years he had
retired from this, too, and had become, what he insisted nature had
always intended him to be, a gentleman of leisure. He retained a
directorship in the trust company, was a trustee of his university, and
was a thorny and inquiring member of many charitable boards.

He prided himself on having emancipated himself from the ideas of his own
generation. It bored him to listen to his cousins lamenting the
vulgarities of modern life, the lack of elegance in present-day English,
or to hear them explain as they borr