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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 per-
ception, was a man of genius, and though he himself had no
aptitude for the banking mystery he made a point of learn-
ing 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. Dan-
iel 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 them-
selves to foreign conditions; but Mr. Touchett had made of
the very limits of his pliancy half the ground of his gen-
eral 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 fraternize,

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