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 light foot had reached the threshold.  His cousin Clare Dagonet, for instance:  there had been a summer when her voice had sounded far down the windings... but he had run over to Spain for the autumn, and when he came back she was engaged to Peter Van Degen, and for a while it looked black in the cave.  That was long ago, as time is reckoned under thirty; and for three years now he had felt for her only a half-contemptuous pity.  To have stood at the mouth of his cave, and have turned from it to the Van Degen lair—!

Poor Clare repented, indeed—­she wanted it clearly but she repented in the Van Degen diamonds, and the Van Degen motor bore her broken heart from opera to ball.  She had been subdued to what she worked in, and she could never again find her way to the enchanted cave...  Ralph, since then, had reached the point of deciding that he would never marry; reached it not suddenly or dramatically, but with such sober advisedness as is urged on those about to take