“The rent will have to wait.”

A brave young man!  Nevertheless he saw in that moment chasms at his feet—­chasms in which he and his wife and child and his brilliant prospects might be swallowed up.  He changed the subject.

“You didn’t see this cutting,” he said, and passed a slip from a newspaper gummed to a piece of green paper.

George, in his quality of rising young sculptor, received Press cuttings from an agency.  This one was from a somewhat vulgar Society journal, and it gave, in two paragraphs, an account of the recent festivity at George’s studio.  It finished with the words:  “Heidsieck flowed freely.”  He could not guess who had written it.  No!  It was not in the nicest taste, but it furnished indubitable proof that George was still rising, that he was a figure in the world.  “What a rag!” he observed, with an explosion of repugnance.  “Read by suburban shop-girls, I suppose.”

II

George had arranged his career in a quite exceptional way.  It is true that chance had served him; but then he had known how to make use of chance to the highest advantage.  The chance that had served him lay in the facts that Mary Peel had fallen gravely in love with him, that her sole surviving relative was a rich uncle, and that George’s surname was the same as hers and her uncle’s.  He had met niece and uncle in Bursley in the Five Towns, where old Samuel Peel was a personage, and, timidly, a patron of the arts.  Having regard to his golden hair and affection-compelling appearance, it was not surprising that Mary, accustomed to the monotony of her uncle’s house, had surrendered her heart to him.  And it was not surprising that old Peel had at once consented to the match, and made a will in favour of Mary and her offspring.  What was surprising was that old Peel should have begun to part with his money at once, and in large quantities, for he was not of a very open-handed disposition.

The explanation of old Samuel Peel’s generosity was due to his being a cousin of the Peels of Bursley, the great eighteenth-century family of earthenware manufacturers.  The main branch had died out, the notorious Carlotta Peel having expired shockingly in Paris, and another young descendant, Matthew, having been forced under a will to alter his name to Peel-Swynnerton.  So that only the distant cousin, Samuel Peel, was left, and he was a bachelor with no prospect of ever being anything else.  Now Samuel had made a fortune of his own, and he considered that all the honour and all the historical splendours of the Peel family were concentrated in himself.  And he tried to be worthy of them.  He tried to restore the family traditions.  For this he became a benefactor to his native town, a patron of the arts, and a candidate for the Staffordshire County Council.  And when Mary set her young mind on a young man of parts and of ambition, and bearing by hazard the very same name of Peel, old Samuel Peel said to himself:  “The old family name will not die out.  It ought to be more magnificent than ever.”  He said this also to George Peel.