“I ain’t had your advantages, George, and that’s a fact. I got into it too young, and I’m a little chap. But I’ll send the ---- my cheque to-morrow. I got my pride, I ’ope.” It was the first time that thought had ever come to him. III Though not quite the centre of the Turf, the Green Dragon had nursed a _coup_ in its day, nor was it without a sense of veneration. The ownership of Calliope invested ‘Jimmy’ Shrewin with the importance of those out of whom something can be had. It took time for one so long accustomed to beck and call, to mole-like procedure, and the demeanour of young bloods, to realise that he had it. But slowly, with the marked increase of his unpaid-for cheroots, with the way in which glasses hung suspended when he came in, with the edgings up to him, and a certain tendency to accompany him along the street, it dawned on him that he was not only an out-of-bounds bookie, but a man. So long as he had remained unconscious of his double nature he had been content with laying the odds, as best he might, and getting what he could out of every situation, straight or crooked. Now that he was also a man, his complacency was ruffled. He suffered from a growing headiness connected with his horse. She was trained, now, by Polman, further along the Downs, too far for Pulcher’s bobtail; and though her public life was carried on at the Green Dragon, her private life required a train journey over night. ‘Jimmy’ took it twice a week--touting his own horse in the August mornings up on the Downs, without drink or talk, or even cheroots. Early morning, larks singing, and the sound of galloping hoofs! In a moment of expansion he confided to Pulcher that it was ‘bally ’olesome.’ There had been the slight difficulty of being mistaken for a tout by his new trainer, Polman, a stoutish man with the look of one of those large sandy Cornish cats, not precisely furtive because reticence and craft are their nature. But, that once over, his personality swelled slowly. This month of August was one of those interludes, in fact, when nothing happens, but which shape the future by secret ripening. An error to suppose that men conduct finance, high or low, from greed, or love of gambling; they do it out of self-esteem, out of an itch to prove their judgment superior to their neighbours’, out of a longing for importance. George Pulcher did not despise the turning of a penny, but he valued much more the consciousness that men were saying: “Old George, what ’e says goes--knows a thing or two--George Pulcher!” To pull the strings of ‘Jimmy’ Shrewin’s horse was a rich and subtle opportunity absorbingly improvable. But first one had to study the animal’s engagements, and, secondly, to gauge that unknown quantity, her ‘form.’ To make anything of her this year they must ‘get about it.’ That young ‘toff,’ her previous owner, had, of course, flown high, entering her for classic races, high-class handicaps, neglecting the rich chances of lesser occasions.