His father was a gentleman so utterly devoid of imagination that he had never even ventured into business, but had been emotionlessly content to marry and live upon an income sufficient to maintain the material and intellectual traditions of the house of Neville.

Tall, transparently pale, negative in character, he had made it a life object to get through life without increasing the number of his acquaintances—­legacies in the second generation left him by his father, whose father before him had left the grandfathers of these friends as legacies to his son.

[Illustration:  “She and Rita dined with him once or twice.”]

It was a pallid and limited society that Henry Neville and his wife frequented—­a coterie of elderly, intellectual people, and their prematurely dried-out offspring.  And intellectual in-breeding was thinning it to attenuation—­to a bloodless meagreness in which they, who composed it, conceived a mournful pride.

Old New Yorkers all, knowing no other city, no other bourne north of Tenth Street or west of Chelsea—­silent, serene, drab-toned people, whose drawing-rooms were musty with what had been fragrance once, whose science, religion, interests, desires were the beliefs, interests and emotions of a century ago, their colourless existence and passive snobbishness affronted nobody who did not come seeking affront.

To them Theodore Thomas had been the last conductor; his orchestra the last musical expression fit for a cultivated society; the Academy of Music remained their last symphonic temple, Wallack’s the last refuge of a drama now dead for ever.

Delmonico’s had been their northern limit, Stuyvesant Square their eastern, old Trinity their southern, and their western, Chelsea.  Outside there was nothing.  The blatancy and gilt of the million-voiced metropolis fell on closed eyes, and on ears attuned only to the murmurs of the past.  They lived in their ancient houses and went abroad and summered in some simple old-time hamlet hallowed by the headstones of their grandsires, and existed as meaninglessly and blamelessly as the old catalpa trees spreading above their dooryards.

And into this narrow circle Louis Neville and his sister Lily had been born.

It had been a shock to her parents when Lily married Gordon Collis, a mining engineer from Denver.  She came to see them with her husband every year; Collis loved her enough to endure it.

As for Louis’ career, his achievements, his work, they regarded it without approval.  Their last great painters had been Bierstadt and Hart, their last great sculptor, Powers.  Blankly they gazed upon the splendours of the mural symphonies achieved by the son and heir of all the Nevilles; they could not comprehend the art of the Uitlanders; their comment was silence and dignity.

To them all had become only shadowy tradition; even affection and human emotion, and the relationship of kin to kin, of friend to friend, had become only part of a negative existence which conformed to precedent, temporal and spiritual, as written in the archives of a worn-out civilisation.