The most useful and at the same time most dangerous gift that I owe to my father’s side of the family—probably more to the Cheynes than the Graves’—is that I am always able, when it is a question of dealing with officials or getting privileges from public institutions which grudge them, to masquerade as a gentleman. Whatever I happen to be wearing; and because the clothes I wear are not what gentlemen usually wear, and yet I do not seem to be an artist or effeminate, and my accent and gestures are irreproachable, I have even been ‘placed’ as the heir to a dukedom, whose perfect confidence in his rank would explain all such eccentricity. In this way I have been told that I seem, paradoxically, to be more of a gentleman even than one of my elder brothers who spent a number of years as a consular official in the Near East. His wardrobe is almost too carefully a gentleman’s, and he does not allow himself the pseudo-ducal privilege of having disreputable acquaintances and saying on all occasions what he really means. About this being a gentleman business: I paid so heavily for the fourteen years of my gentleman’s education that I feel entitled occasionally to get some sort of return. II My mother married my father largely, it seems, to help him out with his five motherless children. Having any herself was a secondary consideration. But first she had a girl, then she had another girl, and it was very nice of course to have them, but slightly disappointing, because she belonged to the generation and the tradition that made a son the really important event; then I came and I was a fine healthy child. She was forty when I was born and my father was forty-nine. Four years later she had another son and four years later she had still another son. The desired preponderance of male over female was established and twice five made ten. The gap of two generations between my parents and me was easier in a way to bridge than a single generation gap. Children seldom quarrel with their grandparents, and I have been able to think of my mother and father as grandparents. Also, a family of ten means a dilution of parental affection; the members tend to become indistinct. I have often been called: ‘Philip, Richard, Charles, I mean Robert.’