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31 THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY. 31 career. He might have had a career by returning to his own country (though this point is shrouded in uncertainty), and even if Mr. Touchett had been willing to part with him (which was not the case), it would have gone hard with him to put the ocean (which he detested) permanently between himself and the old man whom he regarded as his best friend. Ralph was not only fond of his father, but headmired him he enjoyed the opportunity of observing him. Daniel Touchett to his perception was a man of genius, and -though he himself had no great fancy for the banking business, he made a point of learning enough of it to measure the great figure hi^ father had played. It was not this, however, he mainly relished, it was the old man's effective simplicity. Daniel Touchett had been neither at Harvard nor at Oxford, and it was his own fault if he had put into his son's bunds the key to modern criticism. Ralph, whose head was full of ideas which his father had never guessed, had a high esteem for the latter's originality. Americans, rightly or wrongly, are commended for the ease with which they adapt themselves to foreign conditions ; but Mr. Touchett had given evidence of this talent only up to a certain point. He had made himself thoroughly comfortable in England, but he had never attempted to pitch his thoughts in the English key. He had retained many characteristics of Rutland, Vermont ; his tone, as his son always noted with pleasure, was that of the more luxuriant parts of New England. At the end of his life", especially, he was a gentle, refined, fastidious old man, who combined consummate shrewdness with a sort of fraternising good-humour, and whose feeling about his own position in the world was quite of the democratic sort. It was perhaps his want of imagination and of what is called the historic consciousness ; but to many of the impressions usually made by English life upon the cultivated stranger his sense was completely closed. There were certain differences he never perceived r certain habits he never formed, certain mysteries he never understood. As regards these latter, on the day that he had understood them his son would have thought less well of him. Ralph, on leaving Oxford, spent a couple of years in travelling ; after which he found himself mounted on a high stool in has father's bank. The responsibility and honour of such positions is not, I believe, measured by the height of the stool, which depends upon other considerations ; Ralph, indeed, who had very long legs, was fond of standing, and even of walking about, at his work. To this exercise, however, he was obliged to devote but a limited period, for at the end of some eighteen months he