He was, and he knew it and made no effort to disguise the fact, a typical specimen of the very small class of indolent bystanders made rich by the energy of other men who are to be found in every country.

He was, in fact, the peculiar type of aristocrat only to be found in a democracy--the aristocrat not of blood and breeding or intellect, but of wealth.

He was utterly without any ambition to shine either in social life or politics, or to achieve advertisement by the affectation of a half-genuine interest in any cause.

On the contrary, he reveled in being idle and indifferent, and unlike the aristocrats of Europe he refused to catch that archaic habit, encouraged at Eton and Oxford, of relating everything in the universe to the standards and prejudices of a single class.
Palgrave was triumphantly one-eyed and selfish; but he waited, with a sort of satirical wistfulness, for the time when some one person should cause him to stand eager and startled in a chaos of individualism and indolence and shake him into a Great Emotion.

He had looked for her at all times and places, though without any troublesome optimism or personal energy, and had almost come to believe that she was to him what the end of the rainbow is to the idealist.