ing homesickness for Paris came over him,
and he felt he must go and study art there, and succeed or perish.

My father talked to him like a father, my mother like a mother; we
all hung about him and entreated. He was as obdurate as Tennyson's
sailor-boy whom the mermaiden forewarned so fiercely!

He was even offered a handsome appointment in the London house of
Vougeot-Conti & Co.

But his mind was made up, and to my sorrow, and the sorrow of all
who knew him, he fixed the date of his departure for the 2d of May
(1856),--this being the day after a party at the Gibsons'--a young
dance in honor of Leah's fifteenth birthday, on the 1st--and to
which my sister had procured him an invitation.

He had never been to the Gibsons' before. They belonged to a world
so different to anything he had been accustomed to--indeed, to a
class that he then so much disliked and despised (both as
ex-Guardsman and as the descendant of French toilers of the sea, who
hate and scorn the bourgeois)--that I was curious to see how he
would bear himself there; and rather nervous, for it would have
grieved me that he should look down on people of whom I was getting
very fond. It was his theory that all successful business people
were pompous and purse-proud and vulgar.

I admit that in the fifties we very often were.

There may perhaps be a few survivals of that period: _old_ nouveaux
riches, who are still modestly jocose on the subject of each other's
millions when they meet, and indulge in pompous little pleasantries
about their pet economics, and drop a pompous little _h_ now and
then, and pretend they only did it for fun. But, dear me, there are
other things to be vulgar about in this world besides money and
uncertain aspirates.

If to be pompous and pretentious and insincere is to be vulgar, I really
think the vulgar of our time are not these old plutocrats--not even
their grandsons, who hunt and shoot and yacht and swagger with the
best--but those solemn little prigs who have done well at school or
college, and become radicals and agnostics before they've even had time
to find out what men and women are made of, or what sex they belong to
themselves (if any), and loathe all fun and sport and athletics, and
rave about pictures and books and music they don't understand, and would
pretend to despise if they did--things that were not even _meant_ to be
understood. It doesn't take three generations to make a prig--worse
luck!

At the Gib