Anson was the eldest¹ 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 gliding² along Fifth Avenue in electric "mobiles." In those days he and his brother had an English governess who spoke³ 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 peculiar⁴ 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 snobbish⁵ and formalized vulgarity of the Gilded⁶ 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 disapproval⁷.

 

Anson's first sense of his superiority came to him when he realized the half-grudging American deference⁸ 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

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