George was well aware of the popular gaze, and he supported it with negligent pride.  He had the air of having been born to greatness; cigarette smoke and the fumes of exploded petrol and the rattle of explosions made a fine wake behind his greatness.  In two years, since he had walked into Mr. Haim’s parlour, his body had broadened, his eyes had slightly hardened, and his complexion and hair had darkened.  And there was his moustache, very sprightly, and there was a glint of gold in his teeth.  He had poor teeth, but luxuriant hair, ruthlessly cut and disciplined and subjugated.  His trousers were clipped tightly at the ankles, and his jacket loosely buttoned by the correct button; his soft felt hat achieved the architect’s ideal of combining the perfectly artistic with the perfectly modish.  But the most remarkable and envy-raising portion of his attire was the loose, washable, yellow gloves, with large gauntlets, designed to protect the delicately tended hands when they had to explore among machinery.

He had obtained the motor-bicycle in a peculiar way.  On arriving at Axe Station for the previous Christmas holidays, he had seen two low-hung lamps brilliantly flashing instead of the higher and less powerful lamps of the dogcart, and there had been no light-reflecting flanks of a horse in front of the lamps.  The dark figure sitting behind the lamps proved to be his mother.  His mother herself had driven him home.  He noted calmly that as a chauffeur she had the same faults as the contemned Lois Ingram.  Still, she did drive, and they reached Ladderedge Hall in safety.  He admired, and he was a little frightened by, his mother’s terrific volition to widen her existence.  She would insist on doing everything that might be done, and nobody could stop her.  Who would have dreamt that she, with her narrow, troubled past, and her passionate temperament rendered somewhat harsh by strange experiences, would at the age of forty-six or so be careering about the country at the wheel of a motor-car?  Ah!  But she would!  She would be a girl.  And by her individual force she successfully carried it off!  Those two plotters, she and his stepfather, had conspired to buy a motor-car in secret from him.  No letter from home had breathed a word of the motor-car.  He was thunder-struck, and jealous.  He had spent the whole of the Christmas holidays in that car, and in four days could drive better than his mother, and also—­what was more difficult—­could convince her obstinate self-assurance that he knew far more about the mechanism than she did.  As a fact, her notions of the mechanism, though she was convinced of their rightness, were mainly fantastic.  George of course had had to punish his parents.  He had considered it his duty to do so.  “The least you can do,” he had said discontentedly and menacingly, “the least you can do is to give me a decent motor-bike!” The guilty pair had made amends in the manner thus indicated for them.  George gathered from various signs that his stepfather was steadily and rapidly growing richer.  George had acted accordingly—­not only in the matter of the motor-bicycle, but in other matters.