Against this there was no more to be said, and my sisters eyed me to silence. Somehow or other my sisters always did eye me to silence when I differed from my father.

`Talk of his successful son,' snorted my father, whom I had fairly roused. `He is not fit to black his father's boots. He has his thousands of pounds a year, while his father had perhaps three thousand shillings a year towards the end of his life. He is a successful man; but his father, hobbling about Paleham Street in his grey worsted stockings, broad-brimmed hat and brown swallow-tailed coat, was worth a hundred of George Pontifexes, for all his carriages and horses and the airs he gives himself.'

`But yet,' he added, `George Pontifex is no fool either.' And this brings us to the second generation of the Pontifex family with whom we need concern ourselves.