He retained a directorship in the trust company, was a trustee of his university, and was a thorny and inquiring member of many charitable boards.
He prided himself on having emancipated himself from the ideas of his own generation.

It bored him to listen to his cousins lamenting the vulgarities of modern life, the lack of elegance in present-day English, or to hear them explain as they borrowed money from him the sort of thing a gentleman could or could not do for a living.

But on the subject of what a lady might do he still held fixed and unalterable notions; nor did he ever find it tiresome to hear his own daughter expound the axioms of this subject with a finality he had taught her in her youth.

Having freed himself from fine-gentlemanism, he had quite unconsciously fallen the more easily a prey to fine-ladyism; all his conservatism had gone into that, as a man, forced to give up his garden, might cherish one lovely potted plant.
At a time when private schools were beginning to flourish once more he had been careful to educate Adelaide entirely at home with governesses.
Every summer he took her abroad, and showed her, and talked with her about, books, pictures, and buildings; he inoculated her with such fundamentals as that a lady never wears imitation lace on her underclothes, and the past of the verb to "eat" is pronounced to rhyme with "bet." She spoke French and German fluently, and could read Italian.
He considered her a perfectly educated woman.

She knew nothing of business, political economy, politics, or science.