ite face and curling brown beard, his loud
voice and his falsetto laugh, his absolutely certain opinions, above all
the fervency of his consciousness of being Lord Ashbridge and all which
that implied, completely filled any place he happened to be in, so
that a room empty except for him gave the impression of being almost
uncomfortably crowded. This keen consciousness of his identity was
naturally sufficient to make him very good humoured, since he was
himself a fine example of the type that he admired most. Probably only
two persons in the world had the power of causing him annoyance, but
both of these, by an irony of fate that it seemed scarcely possible to
consider accidental, were closely connected with him, for one was his
sister, the other his only son.

The grounds of their potentiality in this respect can be easily
stated. Barbara Comber, his sister (and so "one of us"), had married an
extremely wealthy American, who, in Lord Ashbridge's view, could not be
considered one of anybody at all; in other words, his imagination failed
to picture a whole class of people who resembled Anthony Jerome. He had
hoped when his sister announced her intention of taking this deplorable
step that his future brother-in-law would at any rate prove to be a
snob--he had a vague notion that all Americans were snobs--and that thus
Mr. Jerome would have the saving grace to admire and toady him. But Mr.
Jerome showed no signs of doing anything of the sort; he treated him
with an austere and distant politeness that Lord Ashbridge could
not construe as being founded on admiration and a sense of his own
inferiority, for it was so clearly founded on dislike. That, however,
did not annoy Lord Ashbridge, for it was easy to suppose that poor Mr.
Jerome knew no better. But Barbara annoyed him, for not only had she
shown herself a renegade in marrying a man who was not "one of us," but
with all the advantages she had enjoyed since birth of knowing what
"we" were, she gloried in her new relations, saying, without any proper
reticence about the matter, that they were Real People, whose character
and wits vastly transcended anything that Combers had to show.

Michael was an even more vexatious case, and in moments of depression
his father thought that he would really turn in his grave at the dismal
idea of Michael having stepped into his honourable shoes. Physically he
was utterly unlike a Comber, and his mind, his general attitude
towards life see