Autocracy dies hard, and it is probable that long after Leagues of Nations have decreed the abolition of all Rulers, the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table will still, in the most inveterate Republics, issue, unquestioned, his unalterable edicts, with his coat-tails monopolising the dining-room fire, and the family income concentrated in his cheque book.  Dick Talbot-Lowry’s pigheadedness was at the root of the downsliding of Mount Music.  Having faced, undaunted, deputations of his tenants; deputations of public bodies; ("Damned interfering blackguards, who ought to be taught to mind their own business!"), having made light of advice from his friends, and of anonymous threatening letters from, presumably, his enemies, he still held fast, and refused to sell the property that had come to him from the men whose portraits had looked down on him from the old walls of Mount Music, all the days of his life.  It was, perhaps, the solitary strand of romance in his nature, the feudal feeling that the Mount Music tenants were his, as they had been his ancestors’, to have and to hold, to rule, to arbitrate for, and to stand by, as a fond and despotic husband rules and stands by an obedient wife, loving her and bullying her (but both entirely for her good).  He had, moreover, the desire to disparage and to disprove new ideas, that is a sign of a mind incapable of originality, and anxious to assert itself negatively, since it must otherwise remain silent.

“But Dick,” his friends would say, “there isn’t a property this side of the county that isn’t sold, except your own!”

“What’s that to me?” says Dick, as stubborn and stupid a King Canute as ever sat with the tide nearing the tops of his hunting-boots; “I don’t care a damn what anybody else does!  And what’s more,” he would add, gloomily, “I can’t afford to sell at seventeen years’ purchase.  Anyhow, what’s mine’s my own!  I’ll be shot if I’ll be bullied!”

“I wouldn’t be at all surprised if you were!” the friends would reply darkly.

To sell at seventeen years’ purchase, was what Mr. St. Lawrence Coppinger had done, following the advice of his agent and solicitor, Mr. Bartholomew Mangan, and his cousin, and late guardian, Major Talbot-Lowry, had found it hard to forgive him.  The business had been arranged while Larry was in Paris, and the expostulations that might have prevailed if delivered viva voce, failed of their effect when presented on foreign paper, in Cousin Dick’s illegible scrawl.  It was all very fine for Larry, ran the illegible scrawl, to talk of selling at such a price, but he ought to see what a hole his doing so put his neighbours in!  Larry hadn’t a squad of incumbrances, and charges, and mortgages, hung round his neck like leeches (and no fault of the Major’s).  He had had to find money in a hurry to pay off one of these cursed things only the other day, and if he hadn’t had the luck to mention it to a friend, who was kind enough to come to the rescue (of course on good security) the Major would have been in a hat, or a hole, Larry couldn’t quite read which.