It's a sort of--of manner.

It's knowing how to do the--the right sort of thing." "What is the right sort of thing ?" "I can't put it into words.

It's what makes you look at one man and say, 'He's a gentleman'; and look at another and see that he isn't." "What is a 'gentleman'-- at Harvard ?" "Just what it is anywhere." "What is it anywhere ?" Again Arthur was silent.
"Then there are only twenty or thirty gentlemen at Harvard?
And the catalogue says there are three thousand or more students." "Oh--of course," began Arthur.

But he stopped short.
How could he make his father, ignorant of "the world" and dominated by primitive ideas, understand the Harvard ideal?
So subtle and evanescent, so much a matter of the most delicate shadings was this ideal that he himself often found the distinction quite hazy between it and that which looked disquietingly like "tommy rot." "And these gentlemen--these here friends of yours--your 'set,' as you call 'em--what are they aiming for ?" Arthur did not answer.

It would be hopeless to try to make Hiram Ranger understand, still less tolerate, an ideal of life that was elegant leisure, the patronage of literature and art, music, the drama, the turf, and the pursuit of culture and polite extravagance, wholly aloof from the frenzied and vulgar jostling of the market place.
With a mighty heave of the shoulders which, if it had found outward relief, would have been a sigh, Hiram Ranger advanced to the hard part of the first task which the mandate, "Put your house in order," had set for him.