his youth was strong and general. "Yes," tradesmen would answer,
"what you say is all right, but you are so young." As if to insinuate
that a man must be either a rascal or a fool until he is thirty, just as
he must be either a fool or a physician after he is forty. Nevertheless,
he had soon compiled a list of several score shops.

His mother said:

"Why don't you grow a beard? Here you spend money on razors, strops,
soaps and brushes, besides a quarter of an hour of your time every day,
and cutting yourself--all to keep yourself from having something that
would be the greatest help to you in business! With a beard you'd look
at least thirty-one. Your father had a splendid beard, and so could you
if you chose."

This was high wisdom. But he would not listen to it. The truth is, he
was getting somewhat dandiacal.

At length his scheme lacked naught but what Denry called a "right-down
good starting shove." In a word, a fine advertisement to fire it off.
Now, he could have had the whole of the first page of the _Signal_
(at that period) for five-and-twenty pounds. But he had been so
accustomed to free advertisements of one sort or another that the notion
of paying for one was loathsome to him. Then it was that he thought of
the Countess of Chell, who happened to be staying at Knype. If he could
obtain that great aristocrat, that ex-Mayoress, that lovely witch, that
benefactor of the district, to honour his Thrift Club as patroness,
success was certain. Everybody in the Five Towns sneered at the Countess
and called her a busybody; she was even dubbed "Interfering Iris" (Iris
being one of her eleven Christian names); the Five Towns was fiercely
democratic--in theory. In practice the Countess was worshipped; her
smile was worth at least five pounds, and her invitation to tea was
priceless. She could not have been more sincerely adulated in the United
States, the home of social equality.

Denry said to himself:

"And why _shouldn't_ I get her name as patroness? I will have her
name as patroness."

Hence the expedition to Sneyd Hall, one of the ancestral homes of the
Earls of Chell.

III

He had been to Sneyd Hall before many times--like the majority of the
inhabitants of the Five Towns--for, by the generosity of its owner,
Sneyd Park was always open to the public. To picnic in Sneyd Park was
one of the chief distractions of the Five Towns on Thursday and Saturday
afternoons. But he had never entered the private g