'He's a gentleman'; and look at another and see that he isn't."

"What is a 'gentleman'--at Harvard?"

"Just what it is anywhere."

"What is it anywhere?"

Again Arthur was silent.

"Then there are only twenty or thirty gentlemen at Harvard? And the
catalogue says there are three thousand or more students."

"Oh--of course," began Arthur. But he stopped short.

How could he make his father, ignorant of "the world" and dominated by
primitive ideas, understand the Harvard ideal? So subtle and evanescent,
so much a matter of the most delicate shadings was this ideal that he
himself often found the distinction quite hazy between it and that which
looked disquietingly like "tommy rot."

"And these gentlemen--these here friends of yours--your 'set,' as you
call 'em--what are they aiming for?"

Arthur did not answer. It would be hopeless to try to make Hiram Ranger
understand, still less tolerate, an ideal of life that was elegant
leisure, the patronage of literature and art, music, the drama, the turf,
and the pursuit of culture and polite extravagance, wholly aloof from the
frenzied and vulgar jostling of the market place.