“We live at the other end of town. I’m a gentleman, of course, being in the Law—lower branch——”
“Quite so,” said Leonard.
“But the old woman—I mean my grandmother—takes jolly good care that I shall know the difference between you and me. You’ve had Eton and College to back you up. You’ve got the House of Commons and a swagger club. That’s your world. Mine is different. We’ve no swells where I live, down the Commercial Road. I’m a solicitor in what you would call a small way. There are no big men our way.”
“It is a learned profession.”
“Yes. I am not a City clerk, like my father.”
“Tell me more about yourself. Your grandfather, you say, was bankrupt. Is he living?”
“No. He went off about ten years ago, boastful to the end of his great smash. His son—that’s my father—was in the City. He was a clerk all his life to a wine-merchant. He died four or five years ago. He was just able to pay for my articles—a hundred pounds—and the stamp—another eighty—and that pretty well cleared him out, except for a little insurance of a hundred. When he died I was just beginning to get along; and I’ve been able to live, and to keep my mother and my grandmother—it’s a tight fit, though—with what I can screw out of Mary Anne.”
“Who is Mary Anne?”
“My sister, Mary Anne. She’s a Board School teacher. But she shoves all the expenses on to me.”
“Oh! I have a whole family of cousins, then, previously unknown. That is interesting. Are there more?”