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II

Anson was the eldest of six children who would some day
divide a fortune of fifteen million dollars, and he reached the age of
reason – is it seven? – at the beginning of the century when daring
young women were already gliding along Fifth Avenue in electric
"mobiles." In those days he and his brother had an English governess
who spoke the language very clearly and crisply and well, so that the
two boys grew to speak as she did – their words and sentences were
all crisp and clear and not run together as ours are. They didn't talk
exactly like English children but acquired an accent that is peculiar to
fashionable people in the city of New York.
In the summer the six children were moved from the house on
71st Street to a big estate in northern Connecticut. It was not a
fashionable locality – Anson's father wanted to delay as long as
possible his children's knowledge of that side of life. He was a man
somewhat superior to his class, which composed New York society,
and to his period, which was the snobbish and formalized vulgarity of
the Gilded Age, and he wanted his sons to learn habits of
concentration and have sound constitutions and grow up into right-
living and successful men. He and his wife kept an eye on them as
well as they were able until the two older boys went away to school,
but in huge establishments this is difficult – it was much simpler in
the series of small and medium-sized houses in which my own youth
was spent – I was never far out of the reach of my mother's voice, of
the sense of her presence, her approval or disapproval.
Anson's first sense of his superiority came to him when he
realized the half-grudging American deference that was paid to him
in the Connecticut village. The parents of the boys he played with
always inquired after his father and mother, and were vaguely excited
when their own children were asked to the Hunters' house. He
accepted this as the natural state of things, and a sort of impatience
with all groups of which he was not the centre – in money, in
position, in authority – remained with him for the rest of his life. He
disdained to struggle with other boys for precedence – he expected it
to be given him freely, and when it wasn't he withdrew into his
family. His family was sufficient, for in the East money is still a
somewhat feudal thing, a clan-forming thing. In the snobbish West,
money separates families to form "sets."