to see you at three o'clock to-morrow afternoon upon the question of
your marriage settlement...." At that hour accordingly Shelton made
his way to Lincoln's Inn Fields, where in fat black letters the names
"Paramor and Herring (Commissioners for Oaths)" were written on the wall
of a stone entrance. He ascended the solid steps with nervousness, and
by a small red-haired boy was introduced to a back room on the first
floor. Here, seated at a table in the very centre, as if he thereby
better controlled his universe, a pug-featured gentleman, without a
beard, was writing. He paused. "Ow, Mr. Richard!" he said; "glad to see
you, sir. Take a chair. Your uncle will be disengaged in 'arf a minute";
and in the tone of his allusion to his employer was the satirical
approval that comes with long and faithful service. "He will do
everything himself," he went on, screwing up his sly, greenish, honest
eyes, "and he 's not a young man."

Shelton never saw his uncle's clerk without marvelling at the prosperity
deepening upon his face. In place of the look of harassment which on
most faces begins to grow after the age of fifty, his old friend's
countenance, as though in sympathy with the nation, had expanded--a
little greasily, a little genially, a little coarsely--every time he
met it. A contemptuous tolerance for people who were not getting on was
spreading beneath its surface; it left each time a deeper feeling that
its owner could never be in the wrong.

"I hope you're well, sir," he resumed: "most important for you to have
your health now you're going-to"--and, feeling for the delicate way to
put it, he involuntarily winked--"to become a family man. We saw it
in the paper. My wife said to me the other morning at breakfast: 'Bob,
here's a Mr. Richard Paramor Shelton goin' to be married. Is that any
relative of your Mr. Shelton?' 'My dear,' I said to her, 'it's the very