It is not, strictly, fair to say that a man is handicapped through life by a name like Struggles, because the legal process by which one can change an undesirable name is inexpensive, but Peter had never thought of such a move, and wore his handicap without being aware of it. In any case, he failed in life. He had a round face, red hair, side-whiskers: took snuff and messed his coat: was perfectly futile in practical affairs and absolutely “a dear.” His scholarship was not profound, but he loved letters genuinely, He had failed steadily for thirty years to run a private school for boys in a suburb which was degenerating to industrialism, and late in life had taken orders, quite sincerely, not in the least with the idea of helping his school with a new respectability. It was, anyhow, beyond help, and a man who offered tradesmen’s sons a sound commercial education was presently to buy him out. Peter Struggles, well in his fifties, became curate to a vicar of forty, in the large, rough-and-tumble parish of St. Mary’s. One says that he had failed in life, and, by Sam’s standards, he had, and even by the working standards of his church. A man at fifty-six should not be a curate with an income of some hundred and twenty pounds a year. But if a man is happy at fifty-six to be a curate with that income? If he find satisfaction in it? Snuff was his indulgence, and the chairmanship of the Concentrics, who were not sectarian, his dissipation. For the rest, Peter had made harbour. To the pushing educationist who had bought him out, for a song, and now profaned his old school buildings with shorthand and the rudiments of bookkeeping, Peter was a failure and a pathetic failure. He was not conscious of failure himself, nor of anything but a serene contentment that he had found, if late, the work that he was fit to do. Through sheer single-minded, inoffensive, unobtrusive goodness he came to be a figure in that parish, and a power. Undignified in bearing, and careless in dress, he had a dignity of mind and soul. Sam Branstone despised a worldly failure, here was a man of more than twice Sam’s years, with less money than Sam had, and, by all his canons, Sam should have despised Peter. But he didn’t. It was partly, no doubt, other people’s opinions that influenced Sam--the universal esteem which Peter Struggles won--but it was by much more the innate nobility of the old curate. Sam began his speaking at the Concentrics to impress his fellow members, he ended by caring only for the appreciation of the quaint, slovenly figure who occupied the chair. He got the appreciation he craved. Peter was shrewd enough to discount Sam’s rhetorics, and the flashy tricks of apt quotation: he saw Sam as a misguided, self-seeking thruster who read only for veneer and spoke only to impress. But, at least, Sam tried, and Peter could admire perseverance. The thing was to direct Sam’s perseverance well, and Peter asked him to supper.