Mr. Pennycomequick ran his eye over the list of managers.
’You will see,’ said Mr. Yeo, ’that our chairman is the Earl of Schofield. His lordship has taken up a hundred and twenty shares of £10 each—the first call is for five shillings per share.’
’Earl Schofield!’ murmured Mr. Pennycomequick. ’Earl Schofield! Earl Schofield! I do not know much of the peerage—not in my line—but the name is familiar to me. Earl Schofield!—Excuse me, but there was a great scoundrel——’
’Hah!’ interrupted Mr. Yeo, and waved his cane, ’there is my secretary signalling to me from away yonder on the dunes. Excuse me—I must go to him.’
’How very odd!’ said Jeremiah. ’I could swear he was in my great-coat.’ He watched the man as he strode away. ’And that hat!—surely I know that also.’
Virgilius, Bishop of Salzburg in the eighth century, condemned the erroneous doctrine held by some that we have antipodes. It was, no doubt, true that men in the Middle Ages had not their antipodes, but it is certainly otherwise now. Where our fathers’ heads were, there now are our feet. Everything is the reverse in this Generation of what it was in the last. Medicine condemns those things which medicine did enjoin, and enjoins those things which were forbidden. What our parents revered that we turn into burlesque, and what they cast aside as worthless that we collect and treasure. Maxims that moulded the conduct in the last generation are trampled underfoot in this, and principles thought immutable are broken by the succeeding age, as royal seals are broken on the death of the sovereign. If we were bred up by our fathers in high Toryism, when of age we turn a somersault and pose as Social Democrats; if we learned the Gospel at our mother’s knee we profess Buddhism with the sprouting of our whiskers. The social and moral barriers set up by our fathers we throw down, and just as pigs when driven in one direction turn their snouts the other way, so do we—so do our children; which is an evidence in favour of Darwinianism, showing that the porcine character still inheres.
It was regarded of old as a canon by romance writers, that the final chapter of the last volume, be it the seventh as in the days of Richardson, or the third as in these of Mudie and Smith, should end with the marriage of the hero and heroine. A cruel and wayward Fate held the couple apart through the entire story, but they came together in the end. And there was a reason for this. Marriage is the climax of the romance of life. It concludes one epoch and opens another, and that which it opens is prosaic. It was concluded, and concluded with some show of reason that a romance should deal with the romantic period of life and finish when that reaches its apogee.