"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