had lived most of his life in England. His references to his family were casual, easy, and indefinite, but carried with them, somehow, the connotations of aristocratic distinction.
He referred to his father often, but always in this casual and easy manner, as “the governor,” and to his mother as “the mater,” flinging in parenthetically with his easy nonchalance such a statement as “of course, my whole crowd came from Devonshire”—a statement which was unadorned and meaningless enough but that somehow—God knows how—carried with it a wonderful evocation of an ancestral seat, an ancient and distinguished name, the quiet but impregnable position of one of the “old county families.”
And yet, God knows how he did it: the man said nothing about his people that might not be said of any modest little family, and probably everything he said was true. He made no open pretences to great name or wealth or ancient lineage, but in these swift, casual, half-blurted-out references to “the governor,” “the mater,” and so on, he projected perfectly a legend of prestige and family that was most engaging in its sense of style and dash and recklessness.
The design of this legend was perfectly familiar to everyone: Eugene had read it a thousand times in the pages of books, but he had never known anyone who could evoke it so perfectly, so tellingly, and with such a non-committal economy of means, as Morison. In this casual, charming, almost nakedly simple picture of his life which he could suggest in a blurted-out phrase without giving a shred of real information about himself, or making a single admission of fact, the characters were few in number, their lineaments broadly and forcibly outlined, and their setting a familiar one.
In this setting Morison himself played the part of the dashing young aristocrat, wild, reckless, and impetuous, always ready for fun, fight, or frolic, a bottle of Scotch, or a pretty woman, a roaring drunk, or a hot seduction—a mad hare-brained sort of fellow who plunged impetuously forward into everything, but who was somehow always saved from the odium that attaches itself to a baser sort of drunkard, brawler, or seducer, because he had in him those mysterious qualities of blood and character that made of him “a gentleman,” and therefore gave his acts a faultless style, a whole immunity.
And the figure that he stroked in of his father was also a pleasant one. For “the governor,” although he existed chiefly for the purpose of admonishment and reproof, as a curb upon the wild spirits of his son, was
