consciousness as it might have stood for their outward form; and the
question as to which the house now seemed to affirm their intrinsic
rightness was that of the social disintegration expressed by
widely-different architectural physiognomies at the other end of Fifth
Avenue. As Ralph pushed the bolts behind him, and passed into the hall,
with its dark mahogany doors and the quiet "Dutch interior" effect of
its black and white marble paving, he said to himself that what Popple
called society was really just like the houses it lived in: a muddle of
misapplied ornament over a thin steel shell of utility. The steel shell
was built up in Wall 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