d mother. The affairs, as
might have been expected, were in muddle enough, and the boy himself
was incorrigibly silly and extravagant. The whole business needed tact
and patience, and in the end had not been very satisfactorily
arranged; during the process Captain Polkington's name had been
mentioned more than once; he figured, among other ways, of spending
much and getting little in return. Somehow or other Rawson-Clew had
got the impression that the Captain was--well, perhaps pretty much
what he really had come to be; and if that was not quite what his wife
had persuaded herself and half Marbridge to think him, surely no one
was to blame. The mistake made was about the Captain's wife and
daughters and position in the town; Rawson-Clew, in the first
instance, never gave them a thought; the Captain was a detached person
in his mind, and, as such, a possible danger to his cousin's loose
cash. He went to No. 27 to talk plainly to the man, not to tell him he
was a shark and an adventurer; it was the Captain himself who
translated and exaggerated thus; not even to tell him what he thought,
that he was a worthless old sponge, but to make it plain that things
would not go on as they had been doing. The girl's interruption had
been annoying, so ill-timed and out of place; she ought to have gone
at once when he suggested it; she had placed him and herself, too, in
an embarrassing position; yet, at the same time--he saw it now, though
he did not earlier--there was something quaint in the way she had both
metaphorically and actually stood between him and her miserable old
father. He had dictated the subsequent letter to the Captain more on
her account than anything else. He considered that by it he was making
her the amend honourable for the unfortunate interview of the
afternoon, as well as closing the incident. Of course, nothing real
was forfeited by the letter, for under no circumstances would the
money have been repaid; he never had any delusion about that. From
which it appears that his opinion of the Captain had not changed.

As for his opinion of Julia, he had not one when he first saw her,
except that she had no business to be there; now, however, he felt
some little interest in her. There was very little that was
interesting in this small Dutch town; it was a refreshing change, he
admitted it to himself, to see a girl here who put her clothes on
properly; something of a change to meet one anywhere who did not at
once f