‘Upon my word, I do not see why I should stand either, if I do my duty. And I would rather hang on in a mill or a bake-shop than in city chambers draped round with cobwebs and filled with empty tin boxes bearing lying titles, or in a vestry hall where I had no business to be, or in a barrack yard where I should never learn the goose step, or in stables or kennels.’ ‘It is my duty to speak,’ said Fan, solemnly, developing a fine talent for lecturing; ‘since you have been so long away, you have forgotten or you do not rightly understand a great deal that will happen if you persist in your folly. All the better class of people in Friarton—the Fremantles and Wrights and that set, who took us up because they expected you to become one of themselves and to do them credit—will drop us again; and who can blame them? when they discover that you have no ambition—that you have a taste for low company—so it will seem to them. We shall of course fall back among the Polleys and the Dadds and the rest of the tradespeople like ourselves,’ said Fan, bitterly. ‘We choose their ranks deliberately as ours, and how can we expect that the members of another rank will continue to stoop to us, or consent, for our sake, to anything so disagreeable as being habitually mixed up with people far beneath them in birth and breeding? Are you not able to recall how dreadful a tea at the Dadds, or a supper at the Polleys, used to be? How, when you were a boy and knew little else, you hated it and shirked it, when father would let you?’ Oliver winced a little, but recovered himself gallantly. ‘I was an intolerable young fool—giving myself airs, as old Dadd once told me to my face. He is a shrewd intelligent old fellow in his linendrapery line. One may easily listen to the experience of a far inferior man.’