But let fish be fish, and fowl fowl—not ‘’alf and ’alf,’ as Oliver Constable would have them. Mrs. Hilliard was not wrong when she judged from her own feelings the general disagreeableness of being dragged up to breathe a higher and purer atmosphere. At the same time, as may have been seen, the shop people, with their plain common sense and shrewd wits—sharpened by jealousy, alarm, and latent sluggish hostility—arrived more quickly and surely at Oliver’s eccentric, high-flying views than the more cultivated portion of the community puzzling over his meaning. Oliver Constable laid himself out to gain old Dadd and induce his senior to look upon him as a man and a brother. Oliver had patience with the draper’s ways, including the loud stale jokes he poked at Oliver as to his getting a wife and Fan’s finding a husband. According to Dadd’s ideas, courtship in some form was the one engrossing concern of all young people—after the attention which the young man was bound to pay to his trade and the pleasure the girl might take in her smart clothes and her outings, which, to be sure, were adjuncts to the main business of her life. Indeed Dadd looked charitably to a suitable marriage for Oliver Constable as the most likely cure for the lad’s folly. Certainly young Dadd, who was several years Oliver’s senior, remained a bachelor. But his father explained the contradiction by rubbing his hands and accusing Jack of being ‘a sad dog’ among the ladies. Jack blustered out, ‘What nonsense, guv’ner! Anyone might tell I had not much to say to the girls by the looks of me,’ clearly regarding the charge as made out and as a feather in his cap. Even his mother, in her sleek demureness, seemed to agree with him. Oliver manfully stood the ‘heavy teas’ under which the Dadds’ table groaned. He ate gallantly the fat bacon and pickled salmon in order that his entertainers, like John Gilpin’s neighbours, might not say he was proud. He did not faint at the sight, or smell, of the raw onions, to which the whole Dadd family were partial. He did not throw down his arms and fly when gin-and-water succeeded tea, and added its contribution to the already salient odours of the back parlour. Luckily, Oliver had a good digestion and a robust constitution; and though the details had not to him the fascination of novelty which they might have possessed for Harry Stanhope, neither were they the exaggerated offences which they had proved to Fan in her craving for outward refinement. It goes without saying that Oliver was free from the affected, effeminate horror of the small pretender to gentility, the snob who, having just cast his native coarse slough, has wriggled himself into a new coat of superfine delicacy and fastidiousness. Oliver rather respected the Dadds for not altering their ordinary style of hospitality out of compliment to what they might imagine his changed habits and tastes.