Anthony Blaine’s grandfather had all the money in the known world and lived in Tarrytown—a remarkable coincidence. Entirely surrounded by cold cash, he had acquired an austere frigidity of manner and was commonly called “Old Chill Blaine.” This relationship made Anthony constantly conscious of social security, since an aristocracy founded sheerly on money postulates wealth in the particular—whatever that means.
His father, an ineffectual æsthete of that prehistoric period known as the Nineties, had died before he was born, apparently thus reversing the customarily usual process of nature—a phenomenon explicable only on the hypothesis that language sometimes obscures the thought it is supposed to elucidate. The fact is that Anthony was a posthumorous child—a kind of practical joke on his surprised mother.
Anthony inherited from his father nothing but his last name, his taper fingers and a million dollars—a miserable heritage.
Mother Dear
But his mother, Beatrice Blaine! She was a woman!—by curious chance. Born in Boston of the old Puritan family of O’Hara, she was educated in Rome—also in Watertown and Ogdensburg, having been fired from three schools successively. She went abroad and was polished in Poland and finished in Finland.
She learned to smoke Camels in the Desert of Sahara and, at the Hague, to drink the national beverage, double strength. All in all, she absorbed a sort of education and an amount of liquor that it will be impossible ever again to find in this country.
In an absent-minded moment, she married Stephen Blaine, because she was a little bit weary, a little bit sad and more than a little bit pie-eyed. He tried to keep step with her, but in less than a year cheerfully died. So Anthony was born fatherless.
Little Child, Who Made You?
His childhood and youth were spent in the midst of privations—private cars, private yachts and private tutors.
At the age of seven he bit bell-boys, at eight smoked cigarettes, at nine played poker, at ten read Rabelais, at eleven imbibed intoxicants, at twelve kissed chorus-girls, and at thirteen his mother died of delirium tremens. He was sent to school at St. Ritz’s.