But his mother and sister were alone in the world--his mother a somewhat
helpless being, his sister still very young and unmarried. He could not
reconcile it to his conscience to go very far from them.

He tried the bar, amid an inner revolt that only increased with time.
And the bar implied London, and the dinners and dances of London, which,
for a man of his family, the probable heir to the lands and moneys of
the Chudleighs, were naturally innumerable. He was much courted, in
spite, perhaps because, of his oddities; and it was plain to him that
with only a small exercise of those will-forces he felt accumulating
within him, most of the normal objects of ambition were within his
grasp. The English aristocratic class, as we all know, is no longer
exclusive. It mingles freely with the commoner world on apparently equal
terms. But all the while its personal and family cohesion is perhaps
greater than ever. The power of mere birth, it seemed to Jacob, was
hardly less in the England newly possessed of household suffrage than in
the England of Charles James Fox's youth, though it worked through other
channels. And for the persons in command of this power, a certain
_appareil de vie_ was necessary, taken for granted. So much income, so
many servants, such and such habits--these things imposed themselves.
Life became a soft and cushioned business, with an infinity of layers
between it and any hard reality--a round pea in a silky pod.

And he meanwhile found himself hungry to throw aside these tamed and
trite forms of existence, and to penetrate to the harsh, true, simple
things behind. His imagination and his heart turned towards the
primitive, indispensable labors on which society rests--the life of the
husbandman, the laborer, the smith, the woodman, the builder; he dreamed
the old, enchanted dream of living with nature; of becoming the brother
not of the few, but of the many. He was still reading in chambers,
however, when his first cousin, the Duke, a melancholy semi-invalid, a
widower, with an only son tuberculous almost from his birth, arrived
from abroad. Jacob was brought into new contact with him. The Duke liked
him, and offered him the agency of his Essex property. Jacob accepted,
partly that he might be quit of the law, partly that he might be in the
country and among the poor, partly for reasons, or ghosts of reasons,
unavowed even to himself. The one terror that haunted his life was the
terror of the dukedom.