All the dwellers in these houses lived in a small way, and all of them drew their incomes from some retail trade. ‘County’ people, from their own high circle, contemplating these lesser worlds, would never have guessed the intense and silent arrogance with which, in turn, these lesser worlds looked down on the struggling aspirants from beneath, on the new and unknown persons who painfully fought to win a footing in St. Eldred’s. But, in the close ring of this aristocracy, the Dadds were certainly the ruling dynasty. Had the wayfarer been privileged with a guide, he would have learned that every fourth house in St. Eldred’s enshrined a Dadd or the relation of a Dadd. Here dwelt Mrs. Reuben Dadd; yonder Mr. and Mrs. Joshua Dadd; and, not a stone’s-throw farther, was the house of the Misses Adelaide and Minna Dadd. As for the head of the family, Mr. Dadd, with his consort, dwelt in a stout-pillared edifice which even an uninstructed stranger must have seen to be the residence of a presiding Power. The Dadds permeated social life in Darnley-on-Downe. They were everywhere, had married into every family, had accorded brides to every neighbouring house of repute, had come at last to be, as it were, the very incarnation of decency and proper pride in Darnley-on-Downe. They were no richer than their neighbours, but in those days wealth gave no precedence, and the Dadds had a prestige which their fellow-nobles in St. Eldred’s lacked. For the Dadds owned land, and, though St. Eldred’s made no attempt to connect itself with the world of landowners and county families, yet a vague aroma of grandeur still clung to the one family in its midst that might be said to verge on the territorial class. The glory of the Dadds was a big freehold farm beyond the town, where they had been established from time immemorial, honourably obscure from the days of Henry the Eighth. St. Eldred’s, accordingly, cherishing its own pedigrees and antiquities, as it did, with as fervent a passion as any Austrian noble, yet by tacit consent accorded supremacy to this landowning family in its midst.