Mr. Horace Pendyce’s mansion, white and long and low, standing well within its acres, had come into the possession of his great-great-great-grandfather through an alliance with the last of the Worsteds.  Originally a fine property let in smallish holdings to tenants who, having no attention bestowed on them, did very well and paid excellent rents, it was now farmed on model lines at a slight loss.  At stated intervals Mr. Pendyce imported a new kind of cow, or partridge, and built a wing to the schools.  His income was fortunately independent of this estate.  He was in complete accord with the Rector and the sanitary authorities, and not infrequently complained that his tenants did not stay on the land.  His wife was a Totteridge, and his coverts admirable.  He had been, needless to say, an eldest son.  It was his individual conviction that individualism had ruined England, and he had set himself deliberately to eradicate this vice from the character of his tenants.  By substituting for their individualism his own tastes, plans, and sentiments, one might almost say his own individualism, and losing money thereby, he had gone far to demonstrate his pet theory that the higher the individualism the more sterile the life of the community.  If, however, the matter was thus put to him he grew both garrulous and angry, for he considered himself not an individualist, but what he called a “Tory Communist.”  In connection with his agricultural interests he was naturally a Fair Trader; a tax on corn, he knew, would make all the difference in the world to the prosperity of England.  As he often said:  “A tax of three or four shillings on corn, and I should be farming my estate at a profit.”

Mr. Pendyce had other peculiarities, in which he was not too individual.  He was averse to any change in the existing order of things, made lists of everything, and was never really so happy as when talking of himself or his estate.  He had a black spaniel dog called John, with a long nose and longer ears, whom he had bred himself till the creature was not happy out of his sight.

In appearance Mr. Pendyce was rather of the old school, upright and active, with thin side-whiskers, to which, however, for some years past he had added moustaches which drooped and were now grizzled.  He wore large cravats and square-tailed coats.  He did not smoke.

At the head of his dining-table loaded with flowers and plate, he sat between the Hon. Mrs. Winlow and Mrs. Jaspar Bellew, nor could he have desired more striking and contrasted supporters.  Equally tall, full-figured, and comely, Nature had fixed between these two women a gulf which Mr. Pendyce, a man of spare figure, tried in vain to fill.  The composure peculiar to the ashen type of the British aristocracy wintered permanently on Mrs. Winlow’s features like the smile of a frosty day.  Expressionless to a degree, they at once convinced the spectator that she was a woman of the best breeding.  Had an