n nor leisure to
think of the state or social life as a whole, and as for dreams or
beauty, it was a condition of survival that they should ignore such
cravings. All the distinctive qualities of my uncle can be thought of as
dictated by his conditions; his success and harshness, the extravagances
that expressed his pride in making money, the uncongenial luxury that
sprang from rivalry, and his self-reliance, his contempt for broad
views, his contempt for everything that he could not understand.

His daughters were the inevitable children of his life. Queer girls they
were! Curiously "spirited" as people phrase it, and curiously limited.
During my Cambridge days I went down to Staffordshire several times. My
uncle, though he still resented my refusal to go into his business, was
also in his odd way proud of me. I was his nephew and poor relation, and
yet there I was, a young gentleman learning all sorts of unremunerative
things in the grandest manner, "Latin and mook," while the sons of his
neighhours, not nephews merely, but sons, stayed unpolished in their
native town. Every time I went down I found extensive changes and
altered relations, and before I had settled down to them off I went
again. I don't think I was one person to them; I was a series of
visitors. There is a gulf of ages between a gaunt schoolboy of sixteen
in unbecoming mourning and two vividly self-conscious girls of eighteen
and nineteen, but a Cambridge "man" of two and twenty with a first and
good tennis and a growing social experience, is a fair contemporary for
two girls of twenty-three and twenty-four.

A motor-car appeared, I think in my second visit, a bottle-green
affair that opened behind, had dark purple cushions, and was controlled
mysteriously by a man in shiny black costume and a flat cap. The high
tea had been shifted to seven and rechristened dinner, but my uncle
would not dress nor consent to have wine; and after one painful
experiment, I gathered, and a scene, he put his foot down and prohibited
any but high-necked dresses.

"Daddy's perfectly impossible," Sybil told me.

The foot had descended vehemently! "My own daughters!" he had said,
"dressed up like--"--and had arrested himself and fumbled and decided to
say--"actresses, and showin' their fat arms for every fool to stare
at!" Nor would he have any people invited to dinner. He didn't, he had
explained, want strangers poking about in his house when he came home
tired. So such c