“Yes, sir,” I put in, delighted at his familiarity with the history of our house; “they were the father and the grandfather of my grandmother.”
“But I had supposed that the family was extinct. You teach me that it survives still in the person of your Uncle Florimond. I am content of it.”
Arthur Ripley and I became as intimate as only boys, I think, can become. We were partners in tops, marbles, décalcomanies, and postage stamps. We spent the recess hour together every day. We walked home together every afternoon. We set out pleasure hunting almost every Saturday—now to watch or to take part in a base-ball match, now to skate in Central Park, now to row on the Harlem River, now to fish in the same muddy stream, where, to the best of my recollection, we never so much as got a single bite. He was “Rip,” to me, and to him I was “Greg.” We belonged, as has been said, to the same set at school; at college we joined the same debating society, and pledged ourselves to the same Greek-letter fraternity.
He was the bravest, strongest fellow I ever knew; a splendid athlete; excelling in all sports that required skill or courage. He was frankness, honesty, generosity personified; a young prince whom I admired and loved, who compelled love and admiration from everybody who knew him. In the whole school there was not a boy whom Ripley couldn't whip; he could have led us all in scholarship as well, only he was careless and rather lazy, and didn't go in for high standing, or that sort of thing. He wrote the best compositions, however, and made the best declamations. I tell you, to hear him recite Spartacus's address to the gladiators—“Ye call me chief, and ye do well to call him chief who for twelve long years has met upon the bloody sands of the arena every shape of man and beast that the broad empire of Rome could furnish”—I tell you, it was thrilling. Ripley's father was a lawyer; and he meant to be a lawyer, too. So far as he was responsible for it, Ripley's influence over me was altogether good. What bad came of my association with him, I alone was to blame for.
Some bad did come, and now I must tell you about it.
He and the other boys of our circle were gentlemen's sons, who lived with their parents in handsome houses, wore fine clothes, had plenty of pocket-money, and generally cut a very dashing figure; whereas I—I was the dependent of a petty Third-Avenue Jewish shopkeeper; I had scarcely any pocket-money whatever; and as for my clothes—my jackets were usually threadbare, and my trousers ornamented at an obtrusive point with two conspicuous patches, that Henrietta had neatly inserted there—trousers, moreover, which had been originally designed for the person of Mr. Marx, but which the skillful Henrietta had cut down and adjusted to my less copious proportions.
And now the bad, if perhaps not unnatural, result of all this was to pique my vanity, and to arouse in me a certain false and quite wrong and improper shame of my condition. I was ashamed because I could not spend money as my companions did; I was ashamed of my shabby clothing; I was ashamed of my connection with Mr. Finkelstein; I was even a little ashamed of my intimacy with Rosalind Earle, for she too occupied a very humble station in the world.
And, as the obverse of this false shame, I became inflated with a pride that was equally false and wrong. I was as good a gentleman as anybody, if not better. I was the dependent of a Third-Avenue shopkeeper, true enough. But I was also the nephew of the Marquis de la Bourbonnaye. And I am afraid that I got into the habit of bragging a good deal about my relationship with that aristocratic person. Anyhow, my state of mind was not by any means a wholesome or a happy one; and by and by it bore practical consequences that were not wholesome or happy either.