Page 52 - the-portrait-of-a-lady

and his ‘social position,’ on which he had never wasted a
care, had the firm perfection of an unthumbed fruit. It was
perhaps his want of imagination and of what is called the
historic consciousness; but to many of the impressions usu-
ally made by English life upon the cultivated stranger his
sense was completely closed. There were certain differences
he had never perceived, certain habits he had never formed,
certain obscurities he had never sounded. As regards these
latter, on the day he had sounded them his son would have
thought less well of him.
Ralph, on leaving Oxford, had spent a couple of years
in travelling; after which he had found himself perched
on a high stool in his father’s bank. The responsibility and
honour of such positions is not, I believe, measured by the
height of the stool, which depends upon other consider-
ations: Ralph, indeed, who had very long legs, was fond of
standing, and even of walking about, at his work. To this
exercise, however, he was obliged to devote but a limited pe-
riod, for at the end of some eighteen months he had become
aware of his being seriously out of health. He had caught a
violent cold, which fixed itself on his lungs and threw them
into dire confusion. He had to give up work and apply, to
the letter, the sorry injunction to take care of himself. At
first he slighted the task; it appeared to him it was not him-
self in the least he was taking care of, but an uninteresting
and uninterested person with whom he had nothing in
common. This person, however, improved on acquaintance,
and Ralph grew at last to have a certain grudging tolerance,
even an undemonstrative respect, for him. Misfortune

52 The Portrait of a Lady