but when he remembered
to what the young men of his generation and his set had looked
forward--the narrow groove of money-making, sport and society to which
their vision had been limited--even his small contribution to the new
state of things seemed to count, as each brick counts in a well-built
wall. He had done little in public life; he would always be by nature
a contemplative and a dilettante; but he had had high things to
contemplate, great things to delight in; and one great man's friendship
to be his strength and pride.

He had been, in short, what people were beginning to call "a good
citizen." In New York, for many years past, every new movement,
philanthropic, municipal or artistic, had taken account of his opinion
and wanted his name. People said: "Ask Archer" when there was a
question of starting the first school for crippled children,
reorganising the Museum of Art, founding the Grolier Club, inaugurating
the new Library, or getting up a new society of chamber music. His
days were full, and they were filled decently. He supposed it was all
a man ought to ask.

Something he knew he had missed: the flower of life. But he thought of
it now as a thing so unattainable and improbable that to have repined
would have been like despairing because one had not drawn the first
prize in a lottery. There were a hundred million tickets in HIS
lottery, and there was only one prize; the chances had been too
decidedly against him. When he thought of Ellen Olenska it was
abstractly, serenely, as one might think of some imaginary beloved in a
book or a picture: she had become the composite vision of all that he
had missed. That vision, faint and tenuous as it was, had kept him
from thinking of other women. He had been what was called a faithful
husband; and when May had suddenly died--carried off by the infectious
pneumonia through which she had nursed their youngest child--he had
honestly mourned her. Their long years together had shown him that it
did not so much matter if marriage was a dull duty, as long as it kept
the dignity of a duty: lapsing from that, it became a mere battle of
ugly appetites. Looking about him, he honoured his own past, and
mourned for it. After all, there was good in the old ways.

His eyes, making the round of the room--done over by Dallas with
English mezzotints, Chippendale cabinets, bits of chosen blue-and-white
and pleasantly shaded electric lamps--came back to the old Eastlak