Читать книгу Wickford Point онлайн

18 страница из 119

"All right," I said, "I'll wait awhile, but I'm going to see Southby."

ssss1

ssss1

The family had always gone to Harvard. Once when Sidney's older brother Harry was on the verge of being fired on account of his low marks, he wrote a letter to the Dean which began: "As one of the fifth generation of my family to have attended Harvard ..." It was his conviction, shared by his mother, my Cousin Clothilde, that this reminder was all that had been necessary to permit him to remain. There was a definite belief in the Brill family that this accumulation of generations at Harvard had an automatic scholastic merit. It was as though the conscience-ridden shades of their ancestors could prod them onward without their own added effort, and this engendered a comfortable feeling that some ancestor would always do something around midyears to provide a flash of intuition in the purgatory of the examination room. That accumulation of scholastic forebears had been useful in later life, in that it gave them a sense of intellectual competence. With their attitude, and the help of conversation, they developed an atmosphere of erudition and of inherited intellectual gift.