sition."

"And you mean that I have neither." Her brother laughed bitterly. "Good
heavens, May, do you think I came home to get married, and live on a
stodgy father-in-law? I've got plenty of other things to think about."
But although he brushed the matter aside scornfully, May's words
remained in his memory. Only men of means and position were wanted in
their circle.

CHAPTER VII

Jimmy's original intention had been to take a couple of rooms of which
Douglas Kelly had told him. They were somewhere in that queer maze of
little streets and courts which lies at the back of Fleet Street, and
would have suited him admirably. But May had objected strongly to the
idea. No one they knew had ever dwelt in such a quarter; and both she
and Henry agreed that it was not the thing for any young man, especially
for a young man of Jimmy's temperament, to live in a place where nobody
would know what he was doing, or what hours he kept. So she had written
to a former maid of hers, who had married and settled in a South London
suburb, and arranged for her to board and lodge Jimmy for a fixed weekly
sum.

Jimmy had given in reluctantly, though he had not shown his reluctance
openly. Abroad, he had gone his own way, doing just as it seemed good to
him; but in England it was different. He was not afraid of his own
people; but he was anxious not to shock them in any way; and, at the
same time, contact with them had brought back much of his respect for
those conventions which had governed his boyhood. He was a Bohemian by
habit, and largely so by nature, yet when he was amongst those who lived
settled lives their influence and example seemed to revive some latent
instinct of staid respectability within himself, and, to a certain
extent, he came to see things with their eyes. True, the phase passed
quickly, so quickly that often during the ensuing months his own people
wondered whether he were not a hypocrite. They were used to men with
fixed temperaments, men you could rely upon to maintain a suitable
standard of propriety. The other kinds they ignored socially, as they
certainly would have ignored Jimmy, had he not been of their own blood;
but they belonged to a class which reckons family as second only to
property, which, though it may quarrel with its relations, always
remembers the relationship, and the sacred right of interference which
relationship gives.

Jimmy's new lodgings were half an hour's journey from the City. You