mselves far from the old beef and beer,
port and pigskin types of the Georgian and early Victorian era. They
were men of the world, abreast of the times, who by virtue of a public
school and 'Varsity training had acquired a manner, a knowledge of men
and affairs, a standard of thought on which it had really never been
needful to improve. Both of them, but especially Mr. Pendyce, kept up
with all that was going forward by visiting the Metropolis six or seven
or even eight times a year. On these occasions they rarely took their
wives, having almost always important business in hand--old College,
Church, or Conservative dinners, cricket-matches, Church Congress, the
Gaiety Theatre, and for Mr. Barter the Lyceum. Both, too, belonged to
clubs--the Rector to a comfortable, old-fashioned place where he could
get a rubber without gambling, and Mr. Pendyce to the Temple of things as
they had been, as became a man who, having turned all social problems
over in his mind, had decided that there was no real safety but in the
past.

They always went up to London grumbling, but this was necessary, and
indeed salutary, because of their wives; and they always came back
grumbling, because of their livers, which a good country rest always
fortunately reduced in time for the next visit. In this way they kept
themselves free from the taint of provincialism.

In the silence of his master's study the spaniel John, whose head, too,
was long and narrow, had placed it over his paw, as though suffering from
that silence, and when his master cleared his throat he guttered his tail
and turned up an eye with a little moon of white, without stirring his
chin.

The clock ticked at the end of the long, narrow room; the sunlight
through the long, narrow windows fell on the long, narrow backs of books
in the glassed book-case that took up the whole of one wall; and this
room, with its slightly leathery smell, seemed a fitting place for some
long, narrow ideal to be worked out to its long and narrow ending.

But Mr. Pendyce would have scouted the notion of an ending to ideals
having their basis in the hereditary principle.

"Let me do my duty and carry on the estate as my dear old father did, and
hand it down to my son enlarged if possible," was sometimes his saying,
very, very often his thought, not seldom his prayer. "I want to do no
more than that."

The times were bad and dangerous. There was every chance of a Radical
Government being re