Silas Roden, commonly called Si Roden—­Herbert’s uncle—­lived in one of those old houses at Paddock Place, at the bottom of the hill where Hanbridge begins.  Their front steps are below the level of the street, and their backyards look out on the Granville Third Pit and the works of the Empire Porcelain Company. 11 was Si’s own house, a regular bachelor’s house, as neat as a pin, and Si was very proud of it and very particular about it.  Herbert, being an orphan, lived with his uncle.  He would be about twenty-five then, and Si fifty odd.  Si had retired from the insurance agency business, and Herbert, after a spell in a lawyer’s office, had taken to art and was in the decorating department at Jackson’s.  They had got on together pretty well, had Si and Herbert, in a grim, taciturn, Five Towns way.  The historical scandal began when Herbert wanted to marry Alice Oulsnam, an orphan like himself, employed at a dress-maker’s in Crown Square, Hanbridge.

“Thou’lt marry her if thou’st a mind,” said Si to Herbert, “but I s’ll ne’er speak to thee again.”

“But why, uncle?”

“That’s why,” said Si.

Now if you have been born in the Five Towns and been blessed with the unique Five Towns mixture of sentimentality and solid sense, you don’t flare up and stamp out of the house when a well-to-do and childless uncle shatters your life’s dream.  You dissemble.  You piece the dream together again while your uncle is looking another way.  You feel that you are capable of out-witting your uncle, and you take the earliest opportunity of “talking it over” with Alice.  Alice is sagacity itself.

Si’s reasons for objecting so politely to the projected marriage were various.  In the first place he had persuaded himself that he hated women.  In the second place, though in many respects a most worthy man, he was a selfish man, and he didn’t want Herbert to leave him, because he loathed solitude.  In the third place—­and here is the interesting part—­he had once had an affair with Alice’s mother and had been cut out:  his one deviation into the realms of romance—­and a disastrous one.  He ought to have been Alice’s father, and he wasn’t.  It angered him, with a cold anger, that Herbert should have chosen just Alice out of the wealth of women in the Five Towns.  Herbert was unaware of this reason at the moment.

The youth was being driven to the conclusion that he would be compelled to offend his uncle after all, when Alice came into two thousand two hundred pounds from a deceased relative in Cheshire.  The thought of this apt legacy does good to my soul.  I love people to come into a bit of stuff unexpected.  Herbert instantly advised her to breathe not a word of the legacy to anyone.  They were independent now, and he determined that he would teach his uncle a lesson.  He had an affection for his uncle, but in the Five Towns you can have an affection for a person, and be extremely and justly savage against that person, and plan cruel revenges on that person, all at the same time.