The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton
page 63 of 502 (12%)
page 63 of 502 (12%)
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"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 law, and then lapse into more or less cultivated inaction. The only essential was that he should live "like a gentleman"--that is, with a tranquil disdain for mere money-getting, a passive openness to the finer sensations, one or two fixed principles as to the quality of wine, and an archaic probity that had not yet learned to distinguish |
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