eve--for he was both kindly and prudent--at
his wife who had been a Tomson. It was not in Stanley to appreciate the
peculiar flavor of the 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. Stan