There are people who gather in the spas and watering places of this world who pooh-pooh our fortune. Après ski, cozy in their wools, handsome before their open hearths, they scandalize amongst themselves in whispers.‘Imagine’, they say,‘saved from ruin because of some cornball sentiment available in every bar and grill and truck stop in the country. It’s not, not...’
Not what? Snobs! Phooey on the First Families. On railroad, steel mill, automotive, public utility, banking and shipping fortunes, on all hermetic legacy, morganatic and blockbuster blood-lines that change the maps and landscapes and alter the mobility patterns, your jungle wheeling and downtown dealing a stone’s throw from warfare. I come of good stock—real estate, mineral water, oxygen, matchbooks: earth, water, air and fire, the old elementals of the material universe, a bellybutton economics, a linchpin one.
It is as I see it a perfect genealogy, and if I can be bought and sold a hundred times over by a thousand men in this country—people in your own town could do it, providents and trailers of hunch, I bless them, who got into this or went into that when it was eight cents a share—I am satisfied with my thirteen or fourteen million. Wealth is not after all the point. The genealogy is. That bridge-trick nexus that brought Newpert to Oh, Salts to Ashenden and Ashenden to Oh, love’s lucky longshots which, paying off, permitted me as they permit every human life! (I have this simple, harmless paranoia of the good-natured man, this cheerful awe.) Forgive my enthusiasm, that I go on like some secular patriot wrapped in the simple flag of self, a professional descendant, every day the closed-for-the-holiday banks and post offices of the heart. And why not? Aren’t my circumstances superb? Whose are better? No boast, no boast. I’ve had it easy, served up on all life’s silver platters like a satrap. And if my money is managed for me and I do no work—less work even than Father, who at least came up with those two slogans, the latter in a six-month solitude that must have been hell for that gregarious man (‘For Our Matchless Friends’: no slogan finally but a broken code, an extension of his own hospitable being, simply the Promethean gift of fire to a guest)—at least I am not‘spoiled’and have in me still alive the nerve endings of gratitude. If it’s miserly to count one’s blessings, Brewster Ashenden’s a miser.
不要用软件啊~!~!!
根本不通嘛~