Southwick is half a suburb, half a village. In the summer months the green seems a living thing. It is there the children talk and tumble when school is over. They are told to go to the green, they are forbidden to go to the green, and it is from the green the eldest girl leads the naughty boy howling. When they are a little older they avoid the green, it is too public then. It is to the green that elevens come from far and near to play their matches. All the summer through the green is a _fete_ of cricket. It is to the green the brass bands come on Saturday. On the green, bat and trap is played till the ball disappears in shadow. The green is common; horses and cows are turned out there. All profit by the green. It is on the edge of the green the housewives come to talk in the limpid moonlight. It is on the green the fathers smoke when the little cottage rooms are unbearable with summer heat. It is on the green that Mrs. Horlock walks with her pugs and the chemist's wife, to the enormous scandal of the neighbourhood. To the right, facing the embankment, and overlooking some fields, is the famous Southdown road, and parallel with the green is Mr. Brookes's property--a solid five acres, with all modern improvements and embellishments, and surrounded by a brick wall over six feet high. Willy hated Southwick. He thought it ugly and vulgar; he regretted deeply that his father would make no advances, and that they were as far from county society to-day as when they came to live in the place thirty years ago. “I knew the best people when I was at Oxford, why can I not know them now? Here we are doing the same thing from year's end to year's end; why, with our money we ought to be hob-nobbing with the duke.” In moments of dejection this was one of Willy's commonest thoughts. “I did my best, but I was opposed. Father doesn't care, and as for the girls, they'll take up with any man so long as he is young. Still, in spite of them I should have got on if I hadn't lost my nerve and had to give up hunting; and without hunting there is no way of making acquaintances.” Willy had relied on a hunter as Berkins had on pheasants and glass-houses. But he hated hunting, and finding he got no further than a few breakfasts, he had told a story of a heavy fall and sold his horses. He had then insisted on dinner-parties, and some few people more or less “county” had been collected; the pretext was politics, but Willy and politics were but a doleful mixture, and the scheme collapsed. The family was not endowed with any social qualifications, Willy least of all, and having failed to advance himself individually, and his family collectively, he threw up the game.