Their supreme quaintness was
their success--as it appeared to him for a while at the time; since he
had never seen a family so brilliantly equipped for failure. Wasn't it
success to have kept him so hatefully long? Wasn't it success to have
drawn him in that first morning at dejeuner, the Friday he came--it was
enough to _make_ one superstitious--so that he utterly committed himself,
and this not by calculation or on a signal, but from a happy instinct
which made them, like a band of gipsies, work so neatly together? They
amused him as much as if they had really been a band of gipsies. He was
still young and had not seen much of the world--his English years had
been properly arid; therefore the reversed conventions of the Moreens--for
they had _their_ desperate proprieties--struck him as topsy-turvy. He
had encountered nothing like them at Oxford; still less had any such note
been struck to his younger American ear during the four years at Yale in
which he had richly supposed himself to be reacting against a Puritan
strain.
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