The Custom of the Country eBook

“They” were his mother and old Mr. Urban Dagonet, both, from Ralph’s earliest memories, so closely identified with the old house in Washington Square that they might have passed for its inner consciousness as it might have stood for their outward form; and the question as to which the house now seemed to affirm their intrinsic rightness was that of the social disintegration expressed by widely-different architectural physiognomies at the other end of Fifth Avenue.  As Ralph pushed the bolts behind him, and passed into the hall, with its dark mahogany doors and the quiet “Dutch interior” effect of its black and white marble paving, he said to himself that what Popple called society was really just like the houses it lived in:  a muddle of misapplied ornament over a thin steel shell of utility.  The steel shell was built up in Wall Street, the social trimmings were hastily added in Fifth Avenue; and the union between them was as monstrous and factitious, as unlike the gradual homogeneous growth which flowers into what other countries know as society, as that between the Blois gargoyles on Peter Van Degen’s roof and the skeleton walls supporting them.

That was what “they” had always said; what, at least, the Dagonet attitude, the Dagonet view of life, the very lines of the furniture in the old Dagonet house expressed.  Ralph sometimes called his mother and grandfather the Aborigines, and likened them to those vanishing denizens of the American continent doomed to rapid extinction with the advance of the invading race.  He was fond of describing Washington Square as the “Reservation,” and of prophesying that before long its inhabitants would be exhibited at ethnological shows, pathetically engaged in the exercise of their primitive industries.

Small, cautious, middle-class, had been the ideals of aboriginal New York; but it suddenly struck the young man that they were singularly coherent and respectable as contrasted with the chaos of indiscriminate appetites which made up its modern tendencies.  He too had wanted to be “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.