The only son of a very small builder who managed to leave a few hundred
pounds behind him for the benefit of Elmsdale, then clerk in a
contractor's office, he had seen enough of the anxieties connected with
his father's business to wash his hands of bricks and mortar.

Experience, perhaps, had taught him also that people who advanced money
to builders made a very nice little income out of the capital so
employed; and it is quite possible that some of his father's
acquaintances, always in want of ready cash, as speculative folks
usually are, offered such terms for temporary accommodation as tempted
him to enter into the business of which Miss Blake spoke so
contemptuously.

Be this as it may, one thing is certain--by the time Elmsdale was thirty
he had established a very nice little connection amongst needy men:
whole streets were mortgaged to him; terraces, nominally the property of
some well-to-do builder, were virtually his, since he only waited the
well-to-do builder's inevitable bankruptcy to enter into possession. He
was not a sixty per cent man, always requiring some very much better
security than "a name" before parting with his money; but still even
twenty per cent, usually means ruin, and, as a matter of course, most of
Mr. Elmsdale's clients reached that pleasant goal.

They could have managed to do so, no doubt, had Mr. Elmsdale never
existed; but as he was in existence, he served the purpose for which it
seemed his mother had borne him; and sooner or later--as a rule, sooner
than later--assumed the shape of Nemesis to most of those who "did
business" with him.

There were exceptions, of course. Some men, by the help of exceptional