He did not explain to her why, but the reason was that he had made up his mind to tell his parents that he wished to marry and to find out once and for all what their attitudes would be toward such a girl as Valerie West.

But he had not yet found courage to do it, and he was lingering on, trying to find it and the proper moment to employ it.
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.