Chapter 5 - Page 2

none the less the mask of a mind that greatly enjoyed its
independence, on which nothing long imposed itself, and which,
naturally inclined to adventure and irony, indulged in a
boundless liberty of appreciation. He began with being a young
man of promise; at Oxford he distinguished himself, to his
father's ineffable satisfaction, and the people about him said
it was a thousand pities so clever a fellow should be shut out
from a career. He might have had a career by returning to his own
country (though this point is shrouded in uncertainty) and even
if Mr. Touchett had been willing to part with him (which was not
the case) it would have gone hard with him to put a watery waste
permanently between himself and the old man whom he regarded as
his best friend. Ralph was not only fond of his father, he
admired him--he enjoyed the opportunity of observing him. Daniel
Touchett, to his perception, was a man of genius, and though he
himself had no aptitude for the banking mystery he made a point
of learning enough of it to measure the great figure his father
had played. It was not this, however, he mainly relished; it was
the fine ivory surface, polished as by the English air, that the
old man had opposed to possibilities of penetration. Daniel
Touchett had been neither at Harvard nor at Oxford, and it was
his own fault if he had placed in his son's hands the key to
modern criticism. Ralph, whose head was full of ideas which his
father had never guessed, had a high esteem for the latter's
originality. Americans, rightly or wrongly, are commended for the
ease with which they adapt themselves to foreign conditions; but
Mr. Touchett had made of the very limits of his pliancy half the
ground of his general success. He had retained in their freshness
most of his marks of primary pressure; his tone, as his son
always noted with pleasure, was that of the more luxuriant parts
of New England. At the end of his life he had become, on his own
ground, as mellow as he was rich; he combined consummate
shrewdness with the disposition superficially to fraternise, and
his "social position," on which he had never wasted a care, had
the firm perfection of an unthumbed fruit. It was perhaps his
want of imagination and of what is called the historic
consciousness; but to many of the impressions usually made by
English life upon the cultivated stranger his sense was
completely closed. There were certain differences he had never
perceived, certain habits he had never formed, certain
obscurities he had never sounded. As regards these latter, on the
day he had sounded them his son would have thought less well of
him.

Ralph, on leaving Oxford, had spent a couple of years in
travelling; after which he had found