Mrs. Leavitt gave tea to the well-to-do of the neighborhood, and took it of them. Very occasionally she and Richard dined with them alternately as hosts and guests. But none of it ran to friendship, or shaped towards intimacy. She was too fussy a woman for friendship, he too embittered and too arrogant a man.
The vicinity of Claygate and Oxshott teemed with the stucco and ornate wood “residences” of rich stockbrokers and successful business men—living elaborately in the lovely countryside—but not of it: of London still, train-catching, market-watching, silk-hatted, bridge-playing.
Bransby rarely hatted in silk, and he preferred Dickens to bridge. He nodded to his rich fellow-villagers, but he clasped them no hand-clasp.
He, too, was in the country but not of it, he too was Londoner to the core; but both in a sense quite different from them.
Deep Dale was a beautiful excrescence—but an excrescence—an elaborate florescence of his wealth, but he had never felt it “home,” except because Alice had rather liked it, and never would feel it “home” again except as Helen and his books might grow to make it so.
There was a flat, too, in Curzon Street Alice had liked it rather more than she had Deep Dale, and while she lived he had too; except that they had been more alone, and in that much more together, at Oxshott, and for that he had always been grateful to Deep Dale, and held it, for that, in some tenderness still. And Helen had been born there.
But to him “Home” meant a dingy house in Marylebone, in which he had been born and his mother died. He avoided seeing it now (an undertaker tenanted the basement and the first floor, a dressmaker, whose clientèle was chiefly of the slenderly-pursed demimonde, the other two floors), but he still held it in his stubborn heart for “home.”
In business Bransby was hard, cold and implastic. He had great talent in the conduct of his affairs, indefatigable industry, undeviating devotion. Small wonder—or rather none—that he grew rich and steadily richer. But had he had the genius to rule kindlier, to be friend as well as master, to win, accept and use the friendship of the men he employed (and now sometimes a little crushed of their best possibility of service by the ruthlessness of his rule and by the unsympathy of his touch), his might well have grown one of the gigantic, wizard fortunes.
Even as things were, Morton Grant, head and trusted clerk, probably attained nearer to friendship with Richard Bransby than did any one else but Latham.
For Grant nothing was relaxed. He was dealt with as crisply and treated as drastically as any office boy of the unconsidered and driven all. Bransby’s to order; Grant’s to obey. But, for all that, the employer felt some hidden, embryonic kindliness for the employee. And the clerk was devoted to the master: accepted the latter’s tyranny almost cordially, and resented it not even at heart or unconsciously.