atic;
complacent, possessive, and well-kept as any Midland landscape. Healthy,
wealthy, wise! No room but for perfection, self-preservation, the
survival of the fittest! "The part of the good citizen," he thought:
"no, if we were all alike, this would n't be a world!"

CHAPTER VI

MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT

"My dear Richard" (wrote Shelton's uncle the next day), "I shall be glad
to see you at three o'clock to-morrow afternoon upon the question of your
marriage settlement...." At that hour accordingly Shelton made his way
to Lincoln's Inn Fields, where in fat black letters the names "Paramor
and Herring (Commissioners for Oaths)" were written on the wall of a
stone entrance. He ascended the solid steps with nervousness, and by a
small red-haired boy was introduced to a back room on the first floor.
Here, seated at a table in the very centre, as if he thereby better
controlled his universe, a pug-featured gentleman, without a beard, was
writing. He paused. "Ow, Mr. Richard!" he said; "glad to see you, sir.
Take a chair. Your uncle will be disengaged in 'arf a minute"; and in the
tone of his allusion to his employer was the satirical approval that
comes with long and faithful service. "He will do everything himself,"
he went on, screwing up his sly, greenish, honest eyes, "and he 's not a
young man."

Shelton never saw his uncle's clerk without marvelling at the prosperity
deepening upon his face. In place of the look of harassment which on
most faces begins to grow after the age of fifty, his old friend's
countenance, as though in sympathy with the nation, had expanded--a
little greasily, a little genially, a little coarsely--every time he met
it. A contemptuous tolerance for people who were not getting on was
spreading beneath its surface; it left each time a deeper feeling that
its owner could never be in the wrong.

"I hope you're well, sir," he resumed: "most important for you to have
your health now you're going-to"--and, feeling for the delicate way to
put it, he involuntarily winked--"to become a family man. We saw it in
the paper. My wife said to me the other morning at breakfast: 'Bob,
here's a Mr. Richard Paramor Shelton goin' to be married. Is that any
relative of your Mr. Shelton?' 'My dear,' I said to her, 'it's the very
man!'"

It disquieted Shelton to perceive that his old friend did not pass the
whole of his life at that table writing in the centre of the room, but
that somewhere (vis