as a bad job long before this; but
it was literally the only thing that really mattered to her in life,
and if she had abandoned the struggle I do not know what would have
become of her.

By ordinary canons Mrs. Payne could not be considered an attractive
woman. The only striking features in her plain, and rather
expressionless face were her eyes, which were of a soft and
extraordinarily beautiful grey. She had large hands and feet, no
figure to speak of, and she dressed abominably. She possessed in fact,
all the virtues and none of the graces, and was, in this respect at any
rate, the diametrical opposite of her son. Her appearance suggested
that life had given her a tremendous battering, a condition that would
have been pitiful if it were not that she also gave the impression of
having doggedly survived it; and for this reason one could not help
admiring her.

Her husband had been a business man of exceptional brilliance, of a
brilliance, indeed, that was almost pathological, and may have
accounted in part for the curious mentality of Arthur. In a short, but
incredibly active life, he had amassed a fortune that was considerable,
even in the midlands where fortunes are made. I do not know what he
manufactured, but his business was conducted in Gloucester, and the
Overton estate, which he acquired shortly before his death, lay under
the shadow of Cotswold, between its escarpment and the isolated hill of
Bredon, within twenty miles of that city. Mr. Payne had died of acute
pneumonia in a sharp struggle that was in keeping with his strenuous
mode of life. Seven months after his death his only child, Arthur, was
born.

In the care of her son, and the control of the fortune to which he
would later succeed, Mrs. Payne, who was blessed with an equal vocation
for motherhood and finance, became happily absorbed. Everything
promised well. The business in Gloucester realised more than she could
have expected, and she settled down in the placid surroundings of
Overton with no care in the world but Arthur's future.

He was a singularly beautiful child, fair-haired, with a skin that even
in manhood was dazzlingly white, and eyes that were as arresting as his
mother's: a creature of immense vitality, who shook off the usual
diseases of childhood without difficulty, and developed an early and
almost abnormal physical perfection. He was not, it is true,
particularly intelligent. He did not begin to talk until he was o