Georgie was never allowed to cross its threshold, and he always called her “Mrs. Ruan.”  The two little girls he adored, and they knew he was their uncle, though with the unquestioning faith of childhood they accepted that he lived alone in a little cottage like a working man because he was eccentric and mustn’t be worried to live as father did.  Ishmael was very fond of this brother—­as fond as John-James’ rigid taciturnity would let him be.  John-James’ chief peculiarity was displayed always during the week’s holiday he took every year; on each day of this week he would make a pilgrimage to some cemetery.  A new graveyard was an unfailing magnet for him; he would spend hours there and return next year to note what new headstones had taken root.  “Why on earth do you want to go and spend all your holiday in cemeteries, John-James?” Georgie had once asked him; “you’ll have to be there for ever and ever some day; why do you want to go before you have to?” John-James, attired in his best broadcloth, with a bowler hat firmly fixed above his weather-beaten face, stared at her stonily “I go to the graveyards,” he said at length, “because them be the only places where folks mind their own business....”

Tom had quite dropped out of the family circle made by Ishmael, Vassie, and John-James.  He found the annoyance of not being received in the same circles as Ishmael and Vassie too irksome to him—­who, he not unfairly considered, had done so much the best and with the greatest handicaps.  The day when he came over to Cloom and found Lord Luxullyan and John-James having tea together was too much for his grasp of social values, and he straightway bought a practice in Plymouth, where he did very well and rose to be an alderman, though the gleaming eminence of mayor never was to be for him.  He married the daughter of a rich draper—­in “the wholesale”—­and as soon as he could afford it he dropped all doubtful practices and became strictly honest in his profession.

Of all the family, Vassie, who had started out with a more defined character than the others, was the least changed.  She was eminently successful—­had been ever since she met Flynn and determined to marry him.  She had made him a good wife, for he was one of those men who need feminine encouragement, and with all his brilliance would never have got so far without her to encourage him.  He was not to be one of the great men of his day, but he had done well, having attained an Under-Secretaryship under Gladstone’s last Administration, which he continued under Lord Rosebery.  With the advent of the Conservative party in ’95 he retired, though still only sixty, and busied himself with a small estate he had bought in Ireland, where he intended to work out his schemes for model Utopian tenancies.  Vassie was irked by the change.  She had carried into middle life her superabundant energy—­her love of being in the eye of the world.  She had no children to occupy her—­her only real quarrel with life—­and it did not suit her to sit in Ireland while her once flaming Dan played with model villages and made notes for his reminiscences.  He had, as flaming dreamers often do, fallen onto the dreams without the fire, and, having attained a certain amount of his ideals, was better pleased to sit and look backwards over those which had not materialised than to face a losing struggle in their cause.