future husband--Austin's elder brother Athelstan, who was well
established as an earthenware broker in London, had a conjugal
misfortune, which reached its climax in the Matrimonial Court, and
left the injured and stately Athelstan with an incomplete household,
a spoiled home, and the sole care of two children, a boy and a girl.
These children were, almost of necessity, clumsily brought up. The
girl married the half-brother of a Lieutenant-General Fores, and Louis
Fores was their son. The boy married an American girl, and had issue,
Julian Maldon and some daughters.

At the age of eighteen, Louis Fores, amiable, personable, and an
orphan, was looking for a career. He had lived in the London suburb of
Barnes, and under the influence of a father whose career had chiefly
been to be the stepbrother of Lieutenant-General Fores. He was in
full possession of the conventionally snobbish ideals of the suburb,
reinforced by more than a tincture of the stupendous and unsurpassed
snobbishness of the British Army. He had no money, and therefore the
liberal professions and the higher division of the Civil Service were
closed to him. He had the choice of two activities: he might tout for
wine, motor-cars, or mineral-waters on commission (like his father),
or he might enter a bank; his friends were agreed that nothing else
was conceivable. He chose the living grave. It is not easy to enter
the living grave, but, august influences aiding, he entered it with
_éclat_ at a salary of seventy pounds a year, and it closed
over him. He would have been secure till his second death had he not
defiled the bier. The day of judgment occurred, the grave opened, and
he was thrown out with ignominy, but ignominy unpublished. The august
influences, by simple cash, and for their own sakes, had saved him
from exposure and a jury.