His  father  v,-as  a  gentleman  so  utterly  devoid  of
imagination  that  he  had  never  even  ventured  into  busi-
ness, but  had  been  emotionlessly  content  to  marry  and
live  upon  an  income  sutticicnt  to  maintain  the  material
and  intellectual  traditions  of  the  house  of  Neville.
Tall,  transparently  pale,  negative  in  character,  he
had  made  it  a  life  object  to  get  through  life  without
increasing  the  number  of  his  acquaintances — legacies  in
the    second   generation    left   him  by   his    father,   whose

290


THE    COMMON   LAW


father  before  him  had  left  the   grandfathers   of  these
friends  as  legacies  to  liis  son.
It  was  a  pallid  and  limited  society  that  Henry
Neville  and  his  wife  frequented — a  coterie  of  elderlj',  in-
tellectual people,  and  their  prematurely  dried-out  off-
spring. And  intellectual  in-breeding  was  thinning  it  to
attenuation — to  a  bloodless  meagreness  in  which  they,
who  composed  it,  conceived  a  mournful  pride.
Old  New  Yorkers  all,  knowing  no  other  cit}",  no
other  bourne  north  of  Tenth  Street  or  west  of
Chelsea — silent,  serene,  drab-toned  people,  whose  draw-
ing-rooms were  musty  with  what  had  been  fra-
grance once,  whose  science,  religion,  interests,  desires
were  the  beliefs,  interests  and  emotions  of  a  cen-
tury ago,  their  colourless  existence  and  passive  snob-
bishness affronted  nobody  who  did  not  come  seeking
affront.
To  them  Theodore  Thomas  had  been  the  last  con-
ductor ;  his  orchestra  the  last  musical  expression  fit  for
a  cultivated  societ}' ;  the  Academy  of  jNIusic  remained
their  last  sj'mphonic  temple,  Wallack's  the  last  refuge
of  a  drama  now  dead  for  ever.
