Moretons, that something which in spite of their
naivete and narrowness, had really been rather fine. To him, such
Moretons as were left were 'dry enough sticks, clean out of it.' They
were of a breed that was already gone, the simplest of all country
gentlemen, dating back to the Conquest, without one solitary conspicuous
ancestor, save the one who had been physician to a king and perished
without issue--marrying from generation to generation exactly their own
equals; living simple, pious, parochial lives; never in trade, never
making money, having a tradition and a practice of gentility more
punctilious than the so-called aristocracy; constitutionally paternal and
maternal to their dependents, constitutionally so convinced that those
dependents and all indeed who were not 'gentry,' were of different clay,
that they were entirely simple and entirely without arrogance, carrying
with them even now a sort of Early atmosphere of archery and home-made
cordials, lavender and love of clergy, together with frequent use of the
word 'nice,' a peculiar regularity of feature, and a complexion that was
rather parchmenty. High Church people and Tories, naturally, to a man
and woman, by sheer inbred absence of ideas, and sheer inbred conviction
that nothing else was nice; but withal very considerate of others, really
plucky in bearing their own ills; not greedy, and not wasteful.

Of Becket, as it now was, they would not have approved at all. By what
chance Edmund Moreton (Stanley's mother's grandfather), in the middle of
the eighteenth century, had suddenly diverged from family feeling and
ideals, and taken that 'not quite nice' resolution to make ploughs and
money, would never now be known. The fact remained, together with the
plough works. A man apparently of curious energy and character,
considering his origin, he had dropped the E from his name, and--though
he continued the family tradition so far as to marry a Fleeming of
Worcestershire, to be paternal to his workmen, to be known as Squire, and
to bring his children up in the older Moreton 'niceness'--he had yet
managed to make his ploughs quite celebrated, to found a little town, and
die still handsome and clean-shaved at the age of sixty-six. Of his four
sons, only two could be found sufficiently without the E to go on making
ploughs. Stanley's grandfather, Stuart Morton, indeed, had tried hard,
but in the end had reverted to the congenital instinct for being just a
Mor