Disgust at being robbed of Fanny struggled in his mind with a feeling of pure, unadulterated wonder.
CHAPTER IV HANCOCK & HANCOCK
Frank Leavesley's uncle, Mr James Hancock of Gordon Square and Southampton Row, Solicitor, was, in the year of this story, still unmarried.
The firm of Hancock & Hancock had thrived in Bloomsbury for upwards of a hundred years. By a judicious exercise of the art of dropping bad clients and picking up good, and retaining the good when picked up, it had built for itself a business second to none in the soliciting world of the Metropolis.
To be a successful solicitor is not so easy a matter as you may suppose. Take your own case, for instance, and imagine how many men you would trust with the fact that your wife is in a madhouse and not on a visit to her aunt; with the reason why your son requires cutting off with a shilling; why you have to pay so much a month to So-and-so—and so on. How many men would you trust with your title-deeds, and bonds, and scrip, even as you would trust yourself?
The art of inspiring confidence combined with the less facile arts of straight dealing and right living, had placed the Hancocks in the first rank of their profession, and kept them there for over a hundred years.
James, the last of the race, was in personal appearance typical of his forebears. Rather tall, thin, with a high colour suggestive of port wine, and a fidgety manner, you would never have guessed him at first sight to be one of the keenest business men in London, the depository of awful secrets, and the instigator and successful leader of legal forlorn hopes.
His dress was genteel, verging on the shabby, a hideous brown horse-hair watch guard crossed his waistcoat, and he habitually carried an umbrella that would have damned the reputation of any struggling professional man.
His sister kept house for him in Gordon Square. She was just one year his senior. An acid woman, early-Victorian in her tendencies and get-up, Patience Hancock, to use the cook's expression, had been "born with the key of the coal cellar in her pocket." She certainly carried the key of the wine cellar there, and the keys of the plate pantry, larder, jam depository, and Tantalus case. Everything lock-upable in the Gordon Square establishment was locked up, and every month or so she received a "warning" from one of the domestics under her charge.