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- 12008
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- 2026-01-30T03:55:03.886Z
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- 11955
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- is America, Christian America, thank God; where, be it what it may,
one’s bank account is of no account whatever in an American’s estimate
of a fellow American.’ Upon which the elders cast a quiet glance toward
the young gentleman, significant of their sense that he had been justly
rebuked; and the rebuked wag, as conscious of the fact, assumed a
contrite demeanour into which, however, he contrived to infuse a twinkle
of irony.
‘I was at Mrs. Jones’s dinner,’ volunteered another sexagenarian in an
arrested stage of development between the ear and the silk purse; ‘I was
at Mrs. Jones’s dinner the other evening--and, by the way, there was
twenty-three million represented by the group, twenty-three million
dollars, think of that, so I computed it--and between certain parties
there was some random talk about Major Gentian, to the effect that he
did well in resigning his place as a leading director of the Dime
Savings Bank, considering that he had generally outlived his
usefulness.’
‘The Major ought to have an attendant,’ says a sunken-cheeked,
heron-legged bachelor of uncertain years, a sort of man the natural
product of the clubs and club-life, so at least the moralising enemies
of clubs would doubtless maintain; ‘he ought to have an attendant, at
any rate it will come to that before long. Tom Dutcher tells me that at
Newport last season, instead of sedately sitting in white waistcoat and
armchair on piazza talking stocks and dividends like most respectable
old worthies of his kind, the Major more than ever before took to
skylarking with those immature little specimens of humanity,
obstreperous enough of themselves, Malthusian superfluities of the
household, the chastisement of intemperate wedlock, and the bane, as we
all have experienced, of many summer resorts. But you know second
childhood has a natural affinity for the first.’
‘To be sure!’ chimes in a young Crœsus of complexion pink and white,
recently returned from a four-in-hand coaching trip in Scotland. ‘To be
sure! And how tediously, too, does he repeat in the smoking-room of the
_Come-and-Goes_, where he occasionally resorts, his musty old romances
of travel, and every version varies from the other. His memory is like
wares at the auction--_going, going_, and anon it will be _gone_.’
‘Yes,’ says yet another, ‘I was talking with him at the ‘Windsor’
yesterday, and his sporadic ideas were like fishing smacks lost in a
Newfoundland fog.’
‘Very much so,’ solemnly remarks a clerical-looking citizen, a
politician high in municipal office; ‘very much so indeed. But have you
observed one little circumstance, gentlemen, and weighed its
significance as a marked symptom--at least some of it--of that
irreparable change that, alas, comes with years? Major Gentian, though a
soldier on the right side in the war, besides being of double
Revolutionary descent--so I am told--nevertheless is far from being that
sanguine New Yorker he used to be, and which in true patriotism we are
all bound to be? What is this, I would like to know, but the natural
optimist doting into the deplorable pessimist.’
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