d 'fuggy.' People seemed to be lurking everywhere, and he plucked
Soames by the sleeve.

"I say, Uncle, you're not going to let those beastly papers in, are
you?"

Soames gave him the sideway look which had reduced many to silence in
its time.

"In here," he said. "You needn't take off your furs, Winifred."

Val entered behind them, nettled and with his head up. In this
confounded hole everybody--and there were a good many of them--seemed
sitting on everybody else's knee, though really divided from each other
by pews; and Val had a feeling that they might all slip down together
into the well. This, however, was but a momentary vision--of mahogany,
and black gowns, and white blobs of wigs and faces and papers, all
rather secret and whispery--before he was sitting next his mother in the
front row, with his back to it all, glad of her violette de Parme, and
taking off his gloves for the last time. His mother was looking at him;
he was suddenly conscious that she had really wanted him there next to
her, and that he counted for something in this business.

All right! He would show them! Squaring his shoulders, he crossed his
legs and gazed inscrutably at his spats. But just then an 'old Johnny'
in a gown and long wig, looking awfully like a funny raddled woman, came
through a door into the high pew opposite, and he had to uncross his
legs hastily, and stand up with everybody else.

'Dartie versus Dartie!'

It seemed to Val unspeakably disgusting to have one's name called out
like this in public! And, suddenly conscious that someone nearly behind
him had begun talking about his family, he screwed his face round to
see an old be-wigged buffer, who spoke as if he were eating his own
words--queer-looking old cuss, the sort of man he had seen once or twice
dining at Park Lane and punishing the port; he knew now where they 'dug
them up.' All the same he found the old buffer quite fascinating, and
would have continued to stare if his mother had not touched his arm.
Reduced to gazing before him, he fixed his eyes on the Judge's face
instead. Why should that old 'sportsman' with his sarcastic mouth
and his quick-moving eyes have the power to meddle with their private
affairs--hadn't he affairs of his own, just as many, and probably just
as nasty? And there moved in Val, like an illness, all the deep-seated
individualism of his breed. The voice behind him droned along:
"Differences about money matters--extravagance of the resp