which he had come.

The Squire stood motionless.

A gambler!

To him, whose existence was bound up in Worsted Skeynes, whose every
thought had some direct or indirect connection with it, whose son was
but the occupier of that place he must at last vacate, whose religion
was ancestor-worship, whose dread was change, no word could be so
terrible. A gambler!

It did not occur to him that his system was in any way responsible for
George's conduct. He had said to Mr. Paramor: "I never had a system; I'm
no believer in systems." He had brought him up simply as a gentleman. He
would have preferred that George should go into the Army, but George had
failed; he would have preferred that George should devote himself to the
estate, marry, and have a son, instead of idling away his time in town,
but George had failed; and so, beyond furthering his desire to join the
Yeomanry, and getting him proposed for the Stoics' Club, what was
there he could have done to keep him out of mischief? And now he was a
gambler!

Once a gambler always a gambler!

To his wife's face, looking down from the wall, he said:

"He gets it from you!"

But for all answer the face stared gently.

Turning abruptly, he left the room, and the spaniel John, for whom he
had been too quick, stood with his nose to the shut door, scenting for
someone to come and open it.

Mr. Pendyce went to his study, took some papers from a locked drawer,
and sat a long time looking at them. One was the draft of his will,
another a list of the holdings at Worsted Skeynes, their acreage and
rents, a third a fair copy of the settlement, re-settling the estate
when he had married. It was at this piece of supreme irony that Mr.
Pendyce looked longest. He did not read it, but he thought:

'And I can't cut it! Paramor says so! A gambler!'

That "crassness" common to all men in this strange world, and in the
Squire intensified, was rather a process than a quality--obedience to an
instinctive dread of what was foreign to himself, an instinctive fear of
seeing another's point of view, an instinctive belief in precedent. And
it was closely allied to his most deep and moral quality--the power of
making a decision. Those decisions might be "crass" and stupid, conduce
to unnecessary suffering, have no relation to morality or reason; but he
could make them, and he could stick to them. By virtue of this power he
was where he was, had been for centuries, and hoped to be for centuries