"It wasn't suited to him, Tom. It was a gentleman's tie. He
wasn't up to it--not the rest of him, It wasn't becoming"...

Then presently Bert got a cyclist's suit, cap, badge, and all;
and to see him and Grubb going down to Brighton (and back)--heads
down, handle-bars down, backbones curved--was a revelation
in the possibilities of the Smallways blood.

Go-ahead Times!

Old Smallways would sit over the fire mumbling of the greatness
of other days, of old Sir Peter, who drove his coach to Brighton
and back in eight-and-twenty hours, of old Sir Peter's white
top-hats, of Lady Bone, who never set foot to ground except to
walk in the garden, of the great, prize-fights at Crawley. He
talked of pink and pig-skin breeches, of foxes at Ring's Bottom,
where now the County Council pauper lunatics were enclosed, of
Lady Bone's chintzes and crinolines. Nobody heeded him. The
world had thrown up a new type of gentleman altogether--a
gentleman of most ungentlemanly energy, a gentleman in dusty
oilskins and motor goggles and a wonderful cap, a stink-making
gentleman, a swift, high-class badger, who fled perpetually along
high roads from the dust and stink he perpetually made. And his
lady, as they were able to see her at Bun Hill, was a
weather-bitten goddess, as free from refinement as a gipsy--not
so much dressed as packed for transit at a high velocity.

So Bert grew up, filled with ideals of speed and enterprise, and
became, so far as he became anything, a kind of bicycle