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 borrowed money from him the sort of thing
a gentleman could or could not do for a living. But on the subject of
what a lady might do he still held fixed and unalterable notions; nor
did he ever find it tiresome to hear his own daughter expound the axioms
of this subject with a finality he had taught her in her youth. Having
freed himself from fine-gentlemanism, he had quite unconsciously fallen
the more easily a prey to fine-ladyism; all his conservatism had gone
into that, as a man, forced to give up his garden, might cherish one