What would it be like? What would Rackham be like? What would it have become? He had a fairly clear memory of the place, though he had not seen it since he was a child—for five-and-a-half years. His father had told him very vaguely and in a few sentences that it “looked twice what it had been”; but he evidently did not like to dwell on any description. He had pictured to himself one or two consolations—meeting again with Corton, the old butler, and the rest of them—he supposed they were all still there—the familiar odd disjointed front of the house, half brick, half timber; the rank grass, the neglected field beyond the rusty iron palings, the ill-kept lawn which were for him not decay, but Home.

His first shock was at the station.

It was not the old brougham that met him, the old horse that he remembered; it was a car, too smart for such a place; and the driver, of all things in the world, a Frenchman, demobilised and (by some strange snobbery of his aunt’s) smuggled in: imported by the favour of some Parliamentarian friend of hers.

The drive was too short. The old ramshackle lodge was gone, and there was, in its place, a Queen Anne cottage of the worst type. The drive was twice as broad as in the old days. The gravel of it clean and new. Then, at a turn, in a moment—the evening still light—he saw Rackham.

But was it Rackham? The front was all timber now. And no one could say whether it was all new or all old. It seemed new, made falsely old. The windows were old-new, anyhow; for they were criss-cross lattice. It made him think of the few times he had seen stage scenery, when he had gone with his father into Berne to the play.

Corton was there when the door opened. And for the first time in so many days he rejoiced a moment in the warmth of the old man’s greeting—but in what surroundings!

The old hall had gone; the next room had been knocked into it. He could have believed it the lounge of an hotel for its garishness. There were strange beams, artificially rough and artificially darkened. There were pictures on the wall which he had never known. All looked new, most abominably aping age.

He was in an ill mood by the time his aunt received him. But that first evening things went quietly enough. She did her best—it was a poor best, but she could do no better. She was precise, she was worldly, she could not bear things to be casual and unfixed; and she was (wrongly) convinced that the boy before her was but a repetition of his father—of whose goodness she had felt nothing, for whose vagueness and slackness she had had all the contempt of her kind.

I say, it was a poor best; and for a week—she thought it well to allow a little time before any business should be talked—the tension grew.

The breaking-point came one evening after dinner in the drawing-room—furnished after some antique fashion which John could not understand and hated—when Hilda Maple, in a tone which seemed to him rather like the commands of an official than converse with one’s kind, began to give him her plans for his future. He was to have so much—not an insufficient allowance—paid thus and thus; he must account for it. She had seen the authorities at Oriel and the rooms he would have. She approved of the rooms. Perhaps she would have preferred Christ Church, but it was his poor, dear father’s wish (she said that as though his father’s wish was necessarily less worthy than her own-—after all, poor Henry had been at Oriel, hadn’t he?).

John made no answer. He listened with increasing anger in his heart.

“They wanted you to read history,” she said, “but I said you would rather read law. You would, I know. Your uncle would have said that. He always said that he wished he had read law himself at the University. He said that it would have saved him three years. And you know, John, you will have to have a profession.”

John sat up in his chair and leaned forward slowly towards the April fire.

“I shall not go to Oxford. I shall find some trade,” he said, in a slow, determined voice.

“What do you mean?” answered his aunt sharply.

“What I say,” answered her nephew.

It was not a courteous beginning in her ears, for she felt she was being enormously kind.