their fathers had slumbered to their deaths
before them. But sometimes Nature (who was not yet a Socialist) rustled
her wings and heaved a sigh, lest the excesses and excrescences of their
system should bring about excesses and excrescences of the opposite sort.
For extravagance of all kinds was what she hated, and of that particular
form of extravagance which Mr. Paramor so vulgarly called "Pendycitis"
she had a horror.

It may happen that for long years the likeness between father and son
will lie dormant, and only when disintegrating forces threaten the links
of the chain binding them together will that likeness leap forth, and by
a piece of Nature's irony become the main factor in destroying the
hereditary principle for which it is the silent, the most worthy, excuse.

It is certain that neither George nor his father knew the depth to which
this "Pendycitis" was rooted in the other; neither suspected, not even in
themselves, the amount of essential bulldog at the bottom of their souls,
the strength of their determination to hold their own in the way that
would cause the greatest amount of unnecessary suffering. They did not
deliberately desire to cause unnecessary suffering; they simply could not
help an instinct passed by time into their fibre, through atrophy of the
reasoning powers and the constant mating, generation after generation, of
those whose motto had been, "Kings of our own dunghills." And now George
came forward, defying his mother's belief that he was a Totteridge, as
champion of the principle in tail male; for in the Totteridges, from whom
in this stress he diverged more and more towards his father's line, there
was some freer strain, something non-provincial, and this had been so
ever since Hubert de-Totteridge had led his private crusade, from which
he had neglected to return. With the Pendyces it had been otherwise;
from immemorial time "a county family," they had construed the phrase
literally, had taken no poetical licences. Like innumerable other county
families, they were perforce what their tradition decreed--provincial in
their souls.

George, a man-about-town, would have stared at being called provincial,
but a man cannot stare away his nature. He was provincial enough to keep
Mrs. Bellew bound when she herself was tired of him, and consideration
for her, and for his own self-respect asked him to give her up. He had
been keeping her bound for two months or more. But there was much