vant. She had forgotten and now remembered.

I solaced myself with some extraordinary dream of coming back to
Bladesover, stern, powerful, after the fashion of Coriolanus. I do not
recall the details, but I have no doubt I displayed great magnanimity...

Well, anyhow I never said I was sorry for pounding young Garvell, and I
am not sorry to this day.

CHAPTER THE SECOND

OF MY LAUNCH INTO THE WORLD AND THE LAST I SAW OF BLADESOVER

I

When I was thus banished from Bladesover House, as it was then thought
for good and all, I was sent by my mother in a vindictive spirit,
first to her cousin Nicodemus Frapp, and then, as a fully indentured
apprentice, to my uncle Ponderevo.

I ran away from the care of my cousin Nicodemus back to Bladesover
House.

My cousin Nicodemus Frapp was a baker in a back street--a slum
rather--just off that miserable narrow mean high road that threads those
exquisite beads, Rochester and Chatham. He was, I must admit, a shock
to me, much dominated by a young, plump, prolific, malingering wife;
a bent, slow-moving, unwilling dark man with flour in his hair and
eyelashes, in the lines of his face and the seams of his coat. I've
never had a chance to correct my early impression of him, and he still
remains an almost dreadful memory, a sort of caricature of incompetent
simplicity. As I remember him, indeed, he presented the servile
tradition perfected. He had no pride in his person; fine clothes and
dressing up wasn't "for the likes of" him, so that he got his wife, who
was no artist at it, to cut his black hair at irregular intervals, and
let his nails become disagreeable to the fastidious eye; he had no pride
in his business nor any initiative; his only virtues were not doing
certain things and hard work. "Your uncle," said my mother--all grown-up
cousins were uncles by courtesy among the Victorian middle-class--"isn't
much to look at or talk to, but he's a Good Hard-Working Man." There
was a sort of base honourableness about toil, however needless, in that
system of inversion. Another point of honour was to rise at or before
dawn, and then laboriously muddle about.

It was very distinctly impressed on my mind that the Good Hard-Working
Man would have thought it "fal-lallish" to own a pocket handkerchief.
Poor old Frapp--dirty and crushed by, product of, Bladesover's
magnificence! He made no fight against the world at all, he was
floundering in small debts that were not so small but that