There was something anomalous, as may already have been noticed, in the social position occupied by the wealthy owner of Updown Paddocks. A simple yeoman by birth, but withal well educated--for he had passed through the grammar-school, at which, according to his mother’s frequent boast, more than half the pupils were “gentlemen’s sons”--John Beacham, whose manners, if not fashionable, were such as to render him quite an admissible guest, was nearly as frequently met with at the tables of the middle-class aristocracy as at the humbler “boards” of those who might be more correctly termed his equals. As a natural result also of his profession as a horse-breeder (bear in mind, however, O captious reader, with what an honest and unselfish steadiness of purpose that trade was carried on), his intimate acquaintance amongst men socially very much his superiors rapidly increased; and so great was the esteem in which John Beacham, not only as an honourable man, but as one whose knowledge of horse-flesh could not be denied, was held, that at the time of his marriage with pretty Honor Blake it would have occasioned no surprise to the Lord-lieutenant of the County had he been invited to meet at dinner the man whose yearly sales of stock amounted on an average to double the net-income of the acknowledged greatest man in Sandyshire. Nor was Mrs. Beacham, after a fashion appreciated by herself, without her share of the popularity and honours enjoyed by her son. It is true that she was never included in the invitations over which her maternal heart rejoiced. Never, even in a dream, had the stately old lady, in her black lutestring dress, and her cap of finest Mechlin lace (a heirloom in her family), found herself a guest at Gillingham Castle, at Clifton Court, or even at the less-imposing table of sporting Dr. Thorpe, the very reverend the Dean of the neighbouring episcopal town of Gawthorpe. But the sensible old woman was quite content to be thus excluded: she entertained very shrewd ideas, not only regarding old womanhood, but the proprieties of life generally, and had not, at her age, to learn that, even had all things besides been what she, in her simplicity, was wont to call “suitable,” there remained the unanswerable fact that after a certain age ladies cease to be ornamental, and as dinner-table guests must therefore expect to be overlooked.