"The grim little generalization remained, none the less, and I may speak of it--since I speak of everything--as still standing: the striking evidence that scarce aught but disaster _could_, in that so unformed and unseasoned society, overtake young men who were in the least exposed. Not to have been immediately launched in business of a rigorous sort was to _be_ exposed--in the absence, I mean, of some fairly abnormal predisposition to virtue; since it was a world so simply constituted that whatever wasn't business, or exactly an office or a "store," places in which people sat close and made money, was just simply pleasure, sought, and sought only, in places in which people got tipsy. There was clearly no mean, least of all the golden one, for it was just the ready, even when the moderate, possession of gold that determined, that hurried on disaster. There were whole sets and groups, there were 'sympathetic,' though too susceptible, races, that seemed scarce to recognize or to find possible any practical application of moneyed, that is, of transmitted ease, however limited, but to go more or less rapidly to the bad with it--which meant even then going as often as possible to Paris...."
"The field was strictly covered, to my young eyes, I make out, by three classes, the busy, the tipsy, and Daniel Webster...."
"It has carried me far from my rather evident proposition that if we saw the 'natural' so happily embodied about us--and in female maturity, or comparative maturity, scarce less than in female adolescence--this was because the artificial, or in other words the complicated, was so little there to threaten it...."
On page 72 he quotes his father on "flagrant morality." In Chapter X we have a remarkable portrayal of a character by almost nothing save vacuums, "timorous philistine in a world of dangers." Our author notes the "finer civility" but does not see that it is a thing of no period. It is the property of a few individuals, personally transmitted. Henry James had a mania for setting these things in an era or a "faubourg," despite the continued testimony that the worst manners have constantly impinged upon the most brilliant societies; that decent detail of conduct is a personal talent.