on
the premises at Hanbridge. Indeed the staff there had a sense of
the unusual, inciting to unusual energy and devotion, when word went
round: "Guv'nor's in the office with Mr. John." The Councillor was
always extremely busy with something other than his main enterprise.
It was now reported, for example, that he was clearing vast sums out
of picture-palaces in Wigan and Warrington. Also he was a religionist,
being Chairman of the local Church of England Village Mission Fund.
And he was a politician, powerful in municipal affairs. And he was a
reformer, who believed that by abolishing beer he could abolish the
poverty of the poor--and acted accordingly. And lastly he liked to
enjoy himself.

Everybody knew by sight his flying white whiskers and protruding ears.
And he himself was well aware of the steady advertising value of
those whiskers--of always being recognizable half a mile off. He met
everybody unflinchingly, for he felt that he was invulnerable at all
points and sure of a magnificent obituary. He was invariably treated
with marked deference and respect. But he was not an honest man. He
knew it. All his family knew it. In business everybody knew it except
a few nincompoops. Scarcely any one trusted him. The peculiar fashion
in which, when he was not present, people "old Jacked" him--this alone
was enough to condemn a man of his years. Lastly, everybody knew that
most of the Batchgrew family was of a piece with its head.

VI

Now Rachel had formed a prejudice against old Batchgrew. She had
formed it, immutably, in a single second of time. One glance at him
in the street--and she had tried and condemned him, according to
the summary justice of youth. She was in that stage of plenary and
unhesitating wisdom when one not only can, but one must, divide the
whole human race sharply into two categories, the sheep and the goats;
and she had sentenced old Batchgrew to a place on the extreme left.
It happened that she knew nothing against him. But she did not require
evidence. She simply did "not like _that man_"--(she italicized
the end of the phrase bitingly to herself)--and there was no appeal
against the verdict. Angels could not have successfully interceded
for him in the courts of her mind. He never guessed, in his aged
self-sufficiency, that his case was hopeless with Rachel, nor even
that the child had dared to have any opinion about him at all.

She was about to slip off the pinafore-apron and drop it