"My father had done well on the whole. He had saved for years and kept his money in banks or in ships, which he understood. But now, when the _Erin's Isle_ was sold and he found himself worth about fifty thousand dollars, he began to invest in all sorts of queer ventures. He wanted to double his fortune before he died. Others had done it, men he met in Leadenhall Street and on the Baltic; why shouldn't he? You see, he had got hold of the _masculine_ part of my mother's ambition all right. She wanted to have an establishment, like a lady; he wanted to found a family in England. The money he was to make was for me. I was, he had settled, to be an engineer. He saw, that with steel coming in, engineering was to be the great gold-mine of the future. So he would provide the capital by which I was to build up a huge fortune. The Carvilles were to be big people, understand; '_my_ son was to be Prime Minister some day,' Humph!" There was no bitterness in the exclamation, only a veiled irony, a detached amusement, at this memory of a dead ambition. We did not interrupt. "They moved out just a little way, to Mildmay Park. You must remember that my father had no friends outside of business friends, and he had no idea that he would gain anything by moving west. My mother disliked what she saw of Kensington and Bayswater, and they thought in their simplicity that places with names like Mildmay Park, Finsbury Park, and finally Oakleigh Park, were good enough to begin on. Each move was a little further out, a little bigger house and a little higher rent until at Oakleigh Park, when I was six years old, it was a big semi-detached villa, with a garden and tennis-lawn and professional people for neighbours. That year my brother was born and my father began to die. "You will laugh, I suppose, at the folly of it, but in her own way, my mother was setting up to be a fine lady. We had a cook and housemaid, and a nurse for me, and fine things I learned from her! We had a hired landau on Saturday afternoon to go drives in, a pew in the church, and sometimes people to dinner. She even got my father to send to Dublin to find out the Carville ancestry and coat-of-arms. She did, that's a fact! So you see, she understood perfectly what was meant in England by keeping up a position. As I said, if my father had not got a sort of mania for turning his money over, the scheme might have gone through.