because, otherwise, his
bread would go unbuttered, or rather, there would be no bread to
butter. For he was the last of a family whose fortune had been their
"blood" and their brains, and not their material possessions. Nothing
had been left to him but the prestige of his birth and his inherited
intellect, and the connections which they opened to him. And these
connections were rosebuds for him to wear in his buttonhole rather than
beefsteak to swell his waistcoat. They entitled him to lead a
cotillion, but not to direct a bank.

His natural parts, as he fully realized, would at any time have secured
a career to him, if he had had the industry to use them assiduously. A
little enterprise, a little initiative would long since have despatched
him to the opportunities and successes of a city. But, always defeated
by the "inertia" which he regarded as a fatal malady of his
temperament--and also, perhaps, by a native distaste for the vulgar
scramble and unsavory methods of the modern business world--his fine
intelligence wasted itself in small tasks and his ambitions dissolved
like dream-stuff in the somnolent atmosphere of Shadyville.

The only success available to him under such conditions was an
advantageous marriage. This he could more than once have accomplished,
for it cost him no effort to practice the abilities of the lover, and
he had, indeed, a reputation for gallantry that invested him with a
dangerous glamour as a suitor. But here he was thwarted each time by a
quality that dominated him as ruthlessly to his undoing as did his
laziness--and this quality was fastidiousness. For him only the
exquisite was good enough. He wanted a woman with a face like an angel
or a flower, and a soul to match it. And this the eligible girl had
never had. So, although he had several times reached the verge of a
leap into matrimonial prosperity, he had always drawn back before the
crucial moment. A laugh--just a note too broad and loud--had once
restrained him from the easy capture of half a million. He could not
live with a woman who laughed like that, he told himself!

And on the other hand, though marriage appealed to him, he could not
accept the exquisite in poverty. A few years before, he had spent a
summer in courting a girl whose profile had enchanted him. In
imagination he saw it always against a background of dull gold--the
pure, slender throat; the sweet, round chin; the delicate, proud lip
and nostril;