“Well,” said Sir Philip, “I’m going to try to show you what Hepplestall’s is, and the portraits on these walls make as good a starting-point as I can think of. That is Reuben, our Founder. There are a few extant businesses in Lancashire founded so long ago as ours; there are even older firms. But such age as ours is rare. It’s been an in-and-out business, the cotton trade. You know the proverb here that ‘It’s three generations from clogs to clogs.’ That is, some fine fellow born to nothing makes a mark in life, rises, fights his way, and beginning as man ends as master, giving the business he founded such momentum as carries it along for the next generation. His son is born to boots, not clogs, but he hasn’t as a rule the strength his father had. He’s lived soft and his stock degenerates through softness. The business of the old man doesn’t go to pieces in the son’s time, but it travels downhill as the momentum given it by its founder loses force. And the grandson of the founder is apt to be born to boots and to die in clogs; he begins as master and ends as man. That is the cycle of three generations on which that proverb is founded, and not unjustly founded. It’s one of the points about the cotton trade that a strong man could force his way out of the ranks, but it’s the fact that his successors were more likely to lose what he left them than to keep it or improve upon it. I’ll go so far as to say that making money is easier than keeping it. “We Hepplestalls have had the gift of keeping it. What a father won, a son has not let go. The sons have been fighters like their fathers before them and with each son the battleground has grown. Well, that might terrify you if I don’t explain that long ago, in your great-grandfather’s time indeed, the firm had outgrown the power of any one man to control it utterly. There were partnerships and a share of the responsibility for the younger sons. More recently, in fact when my father died, we made a private limited company of it. Two of your uncles, Tom and William, in charge in Manchester, have great authority, though mine is the final word. What I am seeking to tell you is that while it is a tremendous thing--tremendous, Rupert--to be the Head of Hepplestall’s, the burden is not one which you will ever be called upon to bear single-handed. The day of the complete autocrat went long ago. But this is true, that the Head of Hep-plestall’s has been the general in command, the chief-of-staff, the man who guarded what his ancestors had won and who increased the stake. That is the Hepplestall tradition in its minimum significance.” Rupert started. In spite of his boyish skepticism he was already seeing himself as the Lilliputian changeling in a house of the Brobdingnagians, and if this were the minimum tradition, what, he wondered, was the maximum?