His tone was slightly patronizing again. The Malgamite was a success, it appeared, and assuredly success is the most difficult emergency that a man has to face in life.
“Very much,” answered Dorothy, quietly. She looked hard at her brother; for Dorothy had long ago gauged him, and had recently gauged Mrs. Vansittart with a facility which is quite incomprehensible to men and easy enough to women. She knew that her brother was not the sort of man to arouse the faintest spark of love in the heart of such a woman as her of whom they spoke. And yet Percy's tone implied as clearly as if the words had been spoken that he had merely to offer to Mrs. Vansittart his hand and heart in order to make her the happiest of women. Either Dorothy or her brother was mistaken in Mrs. Vansittart. Between a man and a woman it is usually the man who is mistaken in an estimate of another woman. Dorothy was wondering, not whether Mrs. Vansittart admired her brother, but why that lady was taking the trouble to convey to him that such was the case.
CHAPTER XII. SUBURBAN
“Le bonheur c'est être né joyeux.”
There are in the suburbs of London certain strata of men which lie in circles of diminishing density around the great city, like debris around a volcano. London indeed erupts every evening between the hours of five and six, and throws out showers of tired men, who lie where they fall—or rather where their season ticket drops them—until morning, when they arise and crowd back again to the seething crater. The deposits of small clerks and tradespeople fall near at hand in a dense shower, bounded on the north by Finchley, on the south by Streatham. An outer circle of head clerks, Government servants, junior partners, covers the land in a stratum reaching as far south as Surbiton, as far north as the Alexandra Palace. And beyond these limits are cast the brighter lights of commerce, law, and finance, who fall, a thin golden shower, in the favoured neighbourhoods of the far suburbs, where, from eventide till morning, they play at being country gentlemen, talking stock and stable, with minds attuned to share and produce.
Mr. Joseph Wade, banker, was one of those who are thrown far afield by the facilities of a fine suburban train service. He wore a frock-coat, a very shiny hat, and he read the Times in the train. He lived in a staring red house, solid brick without and solid comfort within, in the favoured pine country of Weybridge. He was one of those pillars of the British Constitution who are laughed at behind their backs and eminently respected to their faces. His gardeners trembled before him, his coachman, as stout and respectable as himself, knew him to be a just and a good master, who grudged no man his perquisites, and behaved with a fine gentlemanly tact at those trying moments when the departing visitor is desirous of tipping and the coachman knows that it is blessed to receive.
Mr. Wade rather scorned the amateur country-gentleman hobby which so many of his travelling companions affected. It led them to don rough tweed suits on Sunday, and walk about their paddocks and gardens as if these formed a great estate.
“I am a banker,” he said, with that sound common sense which led him to avoid those cheap affectations of superiority that belong to the outer strata of the daily volcanic deposit—“I am a banker, and I am content to be a banker in the evening and on Sundays, as well as during bank-hours. What should I know about horses or Alderneys or Dorking fowls? None of 'em yield a dividend.”