So we would have none set down Bennington de Laney as a prig or a snob because he did not at once decide for his heart as against his aristocratic instincts.  Not only all his early education, but the life lessons of many generations of ancestors had taught him to set a fictitious value on social position.  He was a de Laney on both sides.  He had never been allowed to forget it.  A long line of forefathers, proud-eyed in their gilded frames, mutely gazed their sense of the obligations they had bequeathed to this last representative of their race.  When one belongs to a great family he can not live entirely for himself.  His disgrace or failure reflects not alone on his own reputation, but it sullies the fair fame of men long dead and buried; and this is a dreadful thing.  For all these old Puritans and Cavaliers, these knights and barons, these king’s councillors and scholars, have perchance lived out the long years of their lives with all good intent and purpose and with all earnestness of execution, merely that they might build and send down to posterity this same fair fame.  It is a bold man, or a wicked man, who will dare lightly to bring the efforts of so many lives to naught!  In the thought of these centuries of endeavour, the sacrifice of mere personal happiness does not seem so great an affair after all.  The Family Name has taken to itself a soul.  It is a living thing.  It may be worked for, it may be nourished by affection, it may even be worshipped.  Men may give their lives to it with as great a devotion, with as exalted a sense of renunciation, and as lofty a joy in that renunciation, as those who vow allegiance to St. Francis or St. Dominic.  The tearing of the heart from the bosom often proves to be a mortal hurt when there is nothing to put in the gap of its emptiness.  Not so when a tradition like this may partly take its place.

These, and more subtle considerations, were the noblest elements of Bennington de Laney’s doubts.  But perhaps they were no more potent than some others which rushed through the breach made for them in the young man’s decision.

He had always lived so much at home that he had come to accept the home point of view without question.  That is to say, he never examined the value of his parent’s ideas, because it never occurred to him to doubt them.  He had no perspective.

In a way, then, he accepted as axioms the social tenets held by his mother, or the business methods practised by his father.  He believed that elderly men should speak precisely, and in grammatical, but colourless English.  He believed also that people should, in society, conduct themselves according to the fashion-plate pattern designed by Mrs. de Laney.  He believed these things, not because he was a fool, or shallow, or lacking in humour, or snobbish, but because nothing had ever happened to cause him to examine his beliefs closely, that he might appreciate what they really were.  One of these views was, that cultured people