However, no one else invaded his privacy. The Manor House was very still; the only occasional sound being the soft swish of a curtain stirred by the breeze through the open window.
Mr Ffolliot neither read Gaston Latour nor did he write, though his monograph on Ercole Ferrarese was not yet completed.
Wrapped in thought he sat quite motionless in his deep chair, and the subject that engrossed him was his own youth; comparing what he remembered of it with these queer, careless sons of his, who seemed born to trouble other people, Mr Ffolliot could not call to mind any occasion when he had been a nuisance to anybody. He honestly tried and wholly failed.
Such persons as have been nourished in early youth on Mr Thackeray's inimitable The Rose and The Ring will remember how at the christening of Prince Giglio, the Fairy Blackstick, who was his godmother, said, "My poor child, the best thing I can send you is a little misfortune!"
Now the Fairy Blackstick had evidently absented herself from Hilary Ffolliot's christening, for his youth was one long procession of brilliant successes. It is true that his father, an easy-going, amiable clergyman, died during his first term at Harrow, but that did not affect Hilary's material comfort in any way. It left his mother perfectly free to devote her entire attention to him.
He was a good-looking, averagely healthy boy, who carried all before him at preparatory school. Easily first in every class he entered, he was quite able to hold his own in all the usual games, and he left for Harrow in a blaze of glory, having obtained the most valuable classical scholarship.
Throughout his career at school he never failed to win any prize he tried for, and when he left, it was with scholarships that almost covered the expenses of his time at Cambridge. Moreover, he was head of his house and a member of the Eleven.
His mother, a gentle and unselfish lady, felt that she could not do enough to promote the comfort of so brilliant and satisfactory a son. Hilary's likes and dislikes in the matter of food, Hilary's preference for silk underwear, Hilary's love of art and music, were all matters of equal and supreme importance to Mrs Ffolliot, and in every way she fostered the strain of selfishness that exists even in the best of us.
At the university he did equally well. He took a brilliant degree, and then travelled for a year or so, devoting himself to the study of Italian art and architecture; and finally accepted (he never seemed to try for things like other people) a clerkship in the Foreign Office.
When he was eight and twenty his uncle died, and he inherited Redmarley.