Anson was the eldest of six children who would some day divide a fortune of fifteen million dollars, and he reached the age of reason — is it seven? — at the beginning of the century when daring young women were already gliding along Fifth Avenue in electric "mobiles". In those days he and his brother had an English governess who spoke the language very clearly and crisply and well, so that the two boys grew to speak as she did — their words and sentences were all crisp and clear. They didn’t talk exactly like English children but got an accent that is peculiar to fashionable people in the city of New York.

In the summer the six children were moved from the house in New York to a big estate in northern Connecticut. It was not a fashionable locality — Anson’s father was a man somewhat superior to his class, which composed New York society, which was snobbish and vulgar, and he wanted his sons to learn habits of concentration and have sound constitutions and grow up into right-living and successful men. He and his wife kept an eye on them as well as they were able until the two older boys went away to school, but in huge establishments this is difficult — it was much simpler in the series of small and medium-sized houses in which my own youth was spent — I was never far out of the reach of my mother’s voice, of the sense of her presence, her approval or disapproval.

Anson’s first sense of his superiority came to him when he realized the respect that was paid to him in the Connecticut village. The parents of the boys he played with always inquired after his father and mother, and were excited when their own children were asked to play with him in his parents’ house. He accepted this as the natural state of things, and a sort of impatience with all groups of which he was not the center — in money, in position, in authority — remained with him for the rest of his life. He didn’t want to struggle with other boys for precedence — he expected it to be given him freely, and when it wasn’t he withdrew into his family. His family was enough for him.

At eighteen, Anson was tall and thick-set, with a clear complexion and a healthy color from the ordered life had led in school. His hair was yellow and grew in a funny way on his head, his nose was beaked — these two things kept him from being handsome — but he had a confident charm, and the upper-class men who passed him on the street knew without being told that he was a rich boy and had gone to one of the best schools. Nevertheless, his very superiority kept him from being success in college — the independence was mistaken for egotism, and the refusal to accept the Yale standards with the proper awe seemed to belittle all those who had. So, long before he graduated, he began to shift the center of his life to New York.

He was at home in New York — there was his own house with "the kind of servants you can’t get any more" — and his own family, and the correct manly world of the men’s clubs. His aspirations were conventional enough — they included even the decent girl he would some day marry.

He and I first met in the late summer of 1917 when he was out of Yale, and, like the rest of us, was swept up into the hysteria of the war.