It had a double entrance gate, and from this portal the drive started off for the house door, but deliberately avoided reaching the house door until it had wandered in curves over the entire garden.  That was the Georgian touch!  The modern touch was shown in Councillor Cotterill’s bay windows, bath-room and garden squirter.  There was stabling, in which were kept a Victorian dogcart and a Georgian horse, used by the Councillor in his business.  As sure as ever his wife or daughter wanted the dogcart, it was either out or just going out, or the Georgian horse was fatigued and needed repose.  The man who groomed the Georgian also ploughed the flowerbeds, broke the windows in cleaning them, and put blacking on brown boots.  Two indoor servants had differing views as to the frontier between the kingdom of his duties and the kingdom of theirs, in fact, it was the usual spacious household of successful trade in a provincial town.

Denry got to Bycars Lane without a breakdown.  This was in the days, quite thirteen years ago, when automobilists made their wills and took food supplies when setting forth.  Hence Denry was pleased.  The small but useful fund of prudence in him, however, forbade him to run the car along the unending sinuous drive.  The May night was fine, and he left the loved vehicle with his new furs in the shadow of a monkey-tree near the gate.

As he was crunching towards the door, he had a beautiful idea:  “I’ll take ’em all out for a spin.  There’ll just be room!” he said.

Now even to-day, when the very cabman drives his automobile, a man who buys a motor cannot say to a friend:  “I’ve bought a motor.  Come for a spin,” in the same self-unconscious accents as he would say:  “I’ve bought a boat.  Come for a sail,” or “I’ve bought a house.  Come and look at it.”  Even to-day and in the centre of London there is still something about a motor—­well something....  Everybody who has bought a motor, and everybody who has dreamed of buying a motor, will comprehend me.  Useless to feign that a motor is the most banal thing imaginable.  It is not.  It remains the supreme symbol of swagger.  If such is the effect of a motor in these days and in Berkeley Square, what must it have been in that dim past, and in that dim town three hours by the fastest express from Euston?  The imagination must be forced to the task of answering this question.  Then will it be understood that Denry was simply tingling with pride.

“Master in?” he demanded of the servant, who was correctly starched, but unkempt in detail.

“No, sir.  He ain’t been in for tea.”

("I shall take the women out then,” said Denry to himself.)

“Come in!  Come in!” cried a voice from the other side of the open door of the drawing-room, Nellie’s voice!  The manners and state of a family that has industrially risen combine the spectacular grandeur of the caste to which it has climbed with the ease and freedom of the caste which it has quitted.