--which at the moment seemed dangerously like
the whole--was filled to the brim with the sensations of the previous
evening. Selden understood the symptoms: he recognized the fact that he
was paying up, as there had always been a chance of his having to pay up,
for the voluntary exclusions of his past. He had meant to keep free from
permanent ties, not from any poverty of feeling, but because, in a
different way, he was, as much as Lily, the victim of his environment.
There had been a germ of truth in his declaration to Gerty Farish that he
had never wanted to marry a "nice" girl: the adjective connoting, in his
cousin's vocabulary, certain utilitarian qualities which are apt to
preclude the luxury of charm. Now it had been Selden's fate to have a
charming mother: her graceful portrait, all smiles and Cashmere, still
emitted a faded scent of the undefinable quality. His father was the kind
of man who delights in a charming woman: who quotes her, stimulates her,
and keeps her perennially charming. Neither one of the couple cared for
money, but their disdain of it took the form of always spending a little
more than was prudent. If their house was shabby, it was exquisitely
kept; if there were good books on the shelves there were also good dishes
on the table. Selden senior had an eye for a picture, his wife an
understanding of old lace; and both were so conscious of restraint and
discrimination in buying that they never quite knew how it was that the
bills mounted up.

Though many of Selden's friends would have called his parents poor, he
had grown up in an atmosphere where restricted means were felt only as a
check on aimless profusion: where the few possessions were so good that
their rarity gave them a merited relief, and abstinence was combined with
elegance in a way exemplified by Mrs. Selden's knack of wearing her old
velvet as if it were new. A man has the advantage of being delivered
early from the home point of view, and before Selden left college he had
learned that there are as many different ways of going without money as
of spending it. Unfortunately, he found no way as agreeable as that
practised at home; and his views of womankind in especial were tinged by
the remembrance of the one woman who had given him his sense of "values."
It was from her that he inherited his detachment from the sumptuary side
of life: the stoic's carelessness of material things, combined with the
Epicurean's pleasure in them. Life