sake of violent exercise. He was too indolent for violence, too
inherently fastidious for degeneracy. And deep down somewhere in a
nature that had had no incentive to develop, there was the fag end
of that family shrewdness which had made the early Palgraves envied
and maligned. Tall and well built, with a handsome Anglo-Saxon type
of face, small, soft, fair mustache, large, rather bovine gray eyes,
and a deep cleft in his chin, he gave at first sight an impression
of strength--which left him, however, when he spoke to pretty women.
It was not so much the things he said,--light, jesting, personal
things,--as the indications they gave of the overweening vanity of
the spoiled boy and of a brain which occupied itself merely with the
fluff and thistledown of life. He was, and he knew it and made no
effort to disguise the fact, a typical specimen of the very small
class of indolent bystanders made rich by the energy of other men
who are to be found in every country. He was, in fact, the peculiar
type of aristocrat only to be found in a democracy--the aristocrat
not of blood and breeding or intellect, but of wealth. He was
utterly without any ambition to shine either in social life or
politics, or to achieve advertisement by the affectation of a half-
genuine interest in any cause. On the contrary, he reveled in being
idle and indifferent, and unlike the aristocrats of Europe he
refused to catch that archaic habit, encouraged at Eton and Oxford,
of relating everything in the universe to the standards and
prejudices of a single class.

Palgrave was triumphantly one-eyed and selfish; but he waited, with
a sort of satirical wistfulness, for the time when some one person
should cause him to stand eager and startled in a chaos of
individualism and indolence and shake him into a Great Emotion. He
had looked for her at all times and places, though without any