Chapter 6

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.

Nothing in the Dagonet and Marvell tradition was opposed to this
desultory dabbling with life. For four or five generations it had been
the rule of both houses that a young fellow should go to Columbia or
Harvard, read law, and then lapse into more or less cultivated inaction.
The only essential was that he should live "like a gentleman"--that is,
with a tranquil disdain for mere money-getting, a passive openness to
the finer sensations, one or two fixed principles as to the quality of
wine, and an archaic probity that had not yet learned to distinguish
between private and "business" honour.

No equipment could more thoroughly have unfitted the modern youth for
getting on: it hardly needed the scribbled pages on the desk to complete
the hopelessness of Ralph Marvell's case. He had accepted the fact with
a humorous fatalism. Material resources were limited on both sides of
the house, but there would always be enough for his frugal wants--enough
to buy books (not "editions"), and pay now and then for a holiday dash
to the great centres of art and ideas. And meanwhile there was the world
of wonders within him. As a boy at the sea-side, Ralph, between tides,
had once come on a cave--a secret inaccessible place with glaucous
lights, mysterious murmurs, and a single shaft of communication with the
sky. He had kept his find from the other boys, not churlishly, for he
was always an outspoken lad, but because he felt there were things about
the cave that the others, good fellows as they all were, couldn't be
expected to understand, and that, anyhow, it would never be quite his
cave again after he had let his thick-set freckled cousins play smuggler
and pirate in it.

And so with his inner world. Though so coloured by outer impressions,
it wove a secret curtain about him, and he came and went in it with
the same joy of furtive possession. One day, of course, some one would
discover it and reign there with him--no, reign over it and him. Once or
twice already a