Chapter 5

CHAPTER V

Ralph Touchett was a philosopher, but nevertheless he knocked at
his mother's door (at a quarter to seven) with a good deal of
eagerness. Even philosophers have their preferences, and it must
be admitted that of his progenitors his father ministered most to
his sense of the sweetness of filial dependence. His father, as
he had often said to himself, was the more motherly; his mother,
on the other hand, was paternal, and even, according to the slang
of the day, gubernatorial. She was nevertheless very fond of her
only child and had always insisted on his spending three months
of the year with her. Ralph rendered perfect justice to her
affection and knew that in her thoughts and her thoroughly
arranged and servanted life his turn always came after the other
nearest subjects of her solicitude, the various punctualities of
performance of the workers of her will. He found her completely
dressed for dinner, but she embraced her boy with her gloved
hands and made him sit on the sofa beside her. She enquired
scrupulously about her husband's health and about the young man's
own, and, receiving no very brilliant account of either, remarked
that she was more than ever convinced of her wisdom in not
exposing herself to the English climate. In this case she also
might have given way. Ralph smiled at the idea of his mother's
giving way, but made no point of reminding her that his own
infirmity was not the result of the English climate, from which
he absented himself for a considerable part of each year.

He had been a very small boy when his father, Daniel Tracy
Touchett, a native of Rutland, in the State of Vermont, came to
England as subordinate partner in a banking-house where some ten
years later he gained preponderant control. Daniel Touchett saw
before him a life-long residence in his adopted country, of
which, from the first, he took a simple, sane and accommodating
view. But, as he said to himself, he had no intention of
disamericanising, nor had he a desire to teach his only son any
such subtle art. It had been for himself so very soluble a
problem to live in England assimilated yet unconverted that it
seemed to him equally simple his lawful heir should after his
death carry on the grey old bank in the white American light. He s
was at pains to intensify this light, however, by sending the boy
home for his education. Ralph spent several terms at an American
school and took a degree at an American university, after which,
as he struck his father on his return as even redundantly native,
he was placed for some three years in residence at Oxford. Oxford
swallowed up Harvard, and Ralph became at last English enough.
His outward conformity to the manners that surrounded him was