had caught at all chances; he was more sophisticated, he was a
gentleman in a state of retrograde, and was in all points inferior to
him whom he crossed in his descent. Berkins had bought a small place,
a villa with some hundred acres attached to it, on the other side of
Preston Park. There he had erected glass houses, and bred a few
pheasants in the corner of a field, and it surprised him to find that
the county families took no notice of him. Mr. Brookes had
sympathised, but the young people laughed at him and Willy had told a
story how he had been to shoot at ----, and when a partridge got up
right in front of his gun, Berkins turned round and shot it,
exclaiming: "That's the way to bring them down!"

And now whenever his name was mentioned, Willy thought of this
incident, so very typical did it seem to him of the man, and he liked
to twit his father with it. But Mr. Brookes could not be brought to
see the joke, and he fell back on the plausible and insidious argument
that, notwithstanding his manners, Berkins was worth eight thousand a
year.

"And very few girls get the chance of catching eight thousand a year;
and she'll miss it, she'll miss it if she doesn't take care."

"You talk of it as if it were an absolute certainty; you don't know
that Berkins wants to marry Grace; he hasn't been here for the last
month."

"Mr. Berkins is not like the young good-for-nothings your sisters
waste their time with, he is a man of means, of eight thousand a year;
you don't expect him to come round here every evening to tea, and to
play tennis, and to walk in the moonlight and talk nonsense. Berkins