Barnstaple was elected Mayor, but without Ronder I doubt whether even he
would have been able to do very much.

The town then revolved, so to speak, entirely on its own axis; it revolved
between the two great events of the year, the summer Polchester Fair, the
winter County Ball, and those two great affairs were conducted, in every
detail and particular, as they had been conducted a hundred years before.
I find it strange, writing from the angle of to-day, to conceive it
possible that so short a time ago anything in England could have been so
conservative. I myself was only thirteen years of age when Ronder came to
our town, and saw all grown figures with the exaggerated colour and
romance that local inquisitive age bestows. About my own contemporaries,
young Jeremy Cole for instance, there was no colour at all, but the older
figures were strange--gigantic, almost mythological. Mrs. Combermere, the
Dean, the Archdeacon, Mrs. Sampson, Canon Ronder, moved about the town, to
my young eyes, like gods and goddesses, and it was not until after my
return to Polchester at the end of my first Cambridge year that I saw
clearly how small a town it was and how tiny the figures in it.

Joan Brandon thought her father a marvellous man, as I have already said,
but she had seen him too often lose his temper, too often snub her mother,
too often be upset by trivial and unimportant details, to conceive him
romantically. Falk, her brother, was romantic to her because she had seen
so much less of him; her father she knew too well. For some time after
Falk's return from Oxford nothing happened. Joan did not know what exactly
she had expected to happen, but she had an uneasy sense that more was
going on behind the scenes than she knew.

The Archdeacon did not speak to Falk unless he were compelled, but Falk
did not seem to mind this in the least. His handsome defiant face flashed