The Adventures Of Augie March - Chapter IV

"After that we had a diminished family life, as though it were care of Georgie that had been the main basis of household union and now everything was disturbed. We looked in different directions, and the old woman had outsmarted herself. Well, we were a disappointment to her too. Maybe she had started out by dreaming she might have a prodigy in one of us to manage to fame. Perhaps. The force that directs these things in us higher beings and brings together lovers to bear the genius that will lead the world a step or two of the slow march toward its perfection, or find the note that will reach the ear of the banded multitude and encourage it to take that step, had come across with a Georgie instead, and with us. We were far from having the stuff in us that she must have wanted. Our parentage needn't have mattered so much, and it wasn't just a question of high or even legal birth. Fouche got as far as Talleyrand. What counted was natural endowment, and on that score she formed the opinion bitterly that we were not born with talents. Nonetheless we could be trained to be decent and gentlemanly, to wear white collars and have clean nails, brushed teeth, table manners, be brought up to fairly good pattern no matter what office we worked in, store we clerked in, teller's cage we reliably counted in - courteous in an elevator, prefatory in asking directions, courtly to ladies, grim and unanswering to streetwalkers, considerate in conveyances, and walking in the paths of a grayer, dimmer Castiglione."