The Way of All Flesh | Page 7

he should live.
This was George's great start in life. He now wore more fashionable clothes than he had
yet been accustomed to, and any little rusticity of gait or pronunciation which he had
brought from Paleham, was so quickly and completely lost that it was ere long impossible
to detect that he had not been born and bred among people of what is commonly called
education. The boy paid great attention to his work, and more than justified the
favourable opinion which Mr Fairlie had formed concerning him. Sometimes Mr Fairlie
would send him down to Paleham for a few days' holiday, and ere long his parents
perceived that he had acquired an air and manner of talking different from any that he had
taken with him from Paleham. They were proud of him, and soon fell into their proper
places, resigning all appearance of a parental control, for which indeed there was no kind
of necessity. In return, George was always kindly to them, and to the end of his life
retained a more affectionate feeling towards his father and mother than I imagine him
ever to have felt again for man, woman, or child.
George's visits to Paleham were never long, for the distance from London was under fifty
miles and there was a direct coach, so that the journey was easy; there was not time,
therefore, for the novelty to wear off either on the part of the young man or of his parents.
George liked the fresh country air and green fields after the darkness to which he had
been so long accustomed in Paternoster Row, which then, as now, was a narrow gloomy
lane rather than a street. Independently of the pleasure of seeing the familiar faces of the
farmers and villagers, he liked also being seen and being congratulated on growing up
such a fine-looking and fortunate young fellow, for he was not the youth to hide his light
under a bushel. His uncle had had him taught Latin and Greek of an evening; he had
taken kindly to these languages and had rapidly and easily mastered what many boys take
years in acquiring. I suppose his knowledge gave him a self-confidence which made itself
felt whether he intended it or not; at any rate, he soon began to pose as a judge of
literature, and from this to being a judge of art, architecture, music and everything else,
the path was easy. Like his father, he knew the value of money, but he was at once more
ostentatious and less liberal than his father; while yet a boy he was a thorough little man
of the world, and did well rather upon principles which he had tested by personal
experiment, and recognised as principles, than from those profounder convictions which
in his father were so instinctive that he could give no account concerning them.
His father, as I have said, wondered at him and let him alone. His son had fairly distanced
him, and in an inarticulate way the father knew it perfectly well. After a few years he
took to wearing his best clothes whenever his son came to stay with him, nor would he
discard them for his ordinary ones till the young man had returned to London. I believe
old Mr Pontifex, along with his pride and affection, felt also a certain fear of his son, as
though of something which he could not thoroughly understand, and whose ways,
notwithstanding outward agreement, were nevertheless not as his ways. Mrs Pontifex felt
nothing of this; to her George was pure and absolute perfection, and she saw, or thought

she saw, with pleasure, that he resembled her and her family in feature as well as in
disposition rather than her husband and his.
When George was about twenty-five years old his uncle took him into partnership on
very liberal terms. He had little cause to regret this step. The young man infused fresh
vigour into a concern that was already vigorous, and by the time he was thirty found
himself in the receipt of not less than 1500 pounds a year as his share of the profits. Two
years later he married a lady about seven years younger than himself, who brought him a
handsome dowry. She died in 1805, when her youngest child Alethea was born, and her
husband did not marry again.



CHAPTER III

In the early years of the century five little children and a couple of nurses began to make
periodical visits to Paleham. It is needless to say they were a rising generation of
Pontifexes, towards whom the old couple, their grandparents, were as tenderly deferential
as they would have been to the children of the Lord Lieutenant of the County. Their
names