least, descended upon him. Irony was the final polish of the shoe, the
ultimate dab of the clothes-brush, a sort of intellectual "There!"--yet
at the brink of this story he has as yet gone no further than the
conscious stage. As you first see him he wonders frequently whether he
is not without honor and slightly mad, a shameful and obscene thinness
glistening on the surface of the world like oil on a clean pond, these
occasions being varied, of course, with those in which he thinks himself
rather an exceptional young man, thoroughly sophisticated, well adjusted
to his environment, and somewhat more significant than any one else
he knows.

This was his healthy state and it made him cheerful, pleasant, and very
attractive to intelligent men and to all women. In this state he
considered that he would one day accomplish some quiet subtle thing that
the elect would deem worthy and, passing on, would join the dimmer stars
in a nebulous, indeterminate heaven half-way between death and
immortality. Until the time came for this effort he would be Anthony
Patch--not a portrait of a man but a distinct and dynamic personality,
opinionated, contemptuous, functioning from within outward--a man who
was aware that there could be no honor and yet had honor, who knew the
sophistry of courage and yet was brave.


A WORTHY MAN AND HIS GIFTED SON

Anthony drew as much consciousness of social security from being the
grandson of Adam J. Patch as he would have had from tracing his line
over the sea to the crusaders. This is inevitable; Virginians and
Bostonians to the contrary notwithstanding, an aristocracy founded
sheerly on money postulates wealth in the particular.