they had never seen one gave them the greater confidence), and Miss
Dobell, who was the best read of all the ladies in our town, called him
"the Viking." This stuck to him, being an easy and emphatic word and
pleasantly cultured.

Indeed, had Brandon come to Polchester as a single man there might have
been many broken hearts; however, in 1875 he had married Amy Broughton,
then a young girl of twenty. He had by her two children, a boy, Falcon,
now twenty-one years of age, and a girl, Joan, just eighteen. Brandon
therefore was safe from the feminine Polchester world; our town is famous
among Cathedral cities for the morality of its upper classes.

It would not have been possible during all these years for Brandon to have
remained unconscious of the remarkable splendour of his good looks. He was
very well aware of it, but any one who called him conceited (and every one
has his enemies) did him a grave injustice. He was not conceited at all--
he simply regarded himself as a completely exceptional person. He was not
elated that he was exceptional, he did not flatter himself because it was
so; God had seen fit (in a moment of boredom, perhaps, at the number of
insignificant and misshaped human beings He was forced to create) to fling
into the world, for once, a truly Fine Specimen, Fine in Body, Fine in
Soul, Fine in Intellect. Brandon had none of the sublime egoism of Sir
Willoughby Patterne--he thought of others and was kindly and often
unselfish--but he did, like Sir Willoughby, believe himself to be of quite
another clay from the rest of mankind. He was intended to rule, God had
put him into the world for that purpose, and rule he would--to the glory
of God and a little, if it must be so, to the glory of himself. He was a
very simple person, as indeed were most of the men and women in the
Polchester of 1897. He did not analyse motives, whether his own or any one
else's; he was aware that he had "weaknesses" (his ungovernable temper was