Willy had been to Oxford, and the arrogance and pomposity of this purse-proud man shocked his sense of decorum. Berkins's vulgarity was more offensive than that of Mr. Brookes. Mr. Brookes was a simple, middle-class man, who had made money straightforwardly and honestly, and he had cultivated his natural taste for pictures to the limit of his capacities and opportunities. Berkins, however, had been born a gentleman, but had had to shift for himself, even when a lad, and he had caught at all chances; he was more sophisticated, he was a gentleman in a state of retrograde, and was in all points inferior to him whom he crossed in his descent. Berkins had bought a small place, a villa with some hundred acres attached to it, on the other side of Preston Park. There he had erected glass houses, and bred a few pheasants in the corner of a field, and it surprised him to find that the county families took no notice of him. Mr. Brookes had sympathised, but the young people laughed at him and Willy had told a story how he had been to shoot at ----, and when a partridge got up right in front of his gun, Berkins turned round and shot it, exclaiming: “That's the way to bring them down!” And now whenever his name was mentioned, Willy thought of this incident, so very typical did it seem to him of the man, and he liked to twit his father with it. But Mr. Brookes could not be brought to see the joke, and he fell back on the plausible and insidious argument that, notwithstanding his manners, Berkins was worth eight thousand a year. “And very few girls get the chance of catching eight thousand a year; and she'll miss it, she'll miss it if she doesn't take care.” “You talk of it as if it were an absolute certainty; you don't know that Berkins wants to marry Grace; he hasn't been here for the last month.” “Mr. Berkins is not like the young good-for-nothings your sisters waste their time with, he is a man of means, of eight thousand a year; you don't expect him to come round here every evening to tea, and to play tennis, and to walk in the moonlight and talk nonsense. Berkins is a man of means, he is a man who can make a settlement.” “Has he spoken to you on the subject, then?”