James Dadd the Ninth came at last to his own, and his unhappy mother, crushed by years of disapproval, sank, unregretted, to the grave. And hardly had St. Eldred’s consigned her decently to the tomb, than James Dadd gave abundant proof of the evil spirit that all his relatives had long suspected. He left Darnley-on-Downe. He shut up the family house; he travelled; he began timidly to live on a scale that drove St. Eldred’s dizzy with horrified astonishment. Thanks to his mother’s economy, he was now extremely rich, and bit by bit began to realize the extent of his opportunities. But, though St. Eldred’s shook its head over him, though the Misses Adelaide and Minna Dadd refused to read the papers any longer, for fear of finding his iniquities chronicled, James Dadd remained the true son of his fathers. Wealth could not make him wealthy; it takes a generation at least to make the genuine spendthrift, to ingraft the joy and the splendour of purchasing. James Dadd remained nervous, awkward, bourgeois in his uneasy enjoyment of his money. Assertive one moment, he was uneasy and parsimonious the next, always self-conscious, always troubled by the disapproval of the only world he really knew--the world that had made him and written its signature large across the face of his personality. Wherever he went, he carried St. Eldred’s, and heard the mild but tremendous tones of the Misses Adelaide and Minna Dadd among the arches of the Colosseum as in the silences of the Desert. Sometimes he defied the voices, sometimes he quailed before them, but escape them he never could. He was out of his sphere; they told him so. He had cast off his own world, and could enter no other. Often in his travels he met other men on similar errands of pleasure, young men and old, sons of country squires or illustrious families. In most cases they had not a quarter of his income, but they seemed to have the careless knack of getting more pleasure out of half a crown than he could ever buy with a five-pound note. Poor as they might be, generations of spending ancestors had left them the secret of spending easily, gaily, serenely, of letting money flow unperceived between their fingers, of securing a double return for their outlay through their very indifference as to whether they ever got any return at all. This was the whole distinction between himself and them. Actual superiority of birth and breeding they had none, though their forbears might be more prominent than his. But centuries of inconspicuousness disqualify a man for the conspicuous position conferred by sudden wealth, and James Dadd, for all his long pedigree, was far less fitted for his new place in life than many a grandson of some successful politician or lawyer, who might number, perhaps, two generations to James Dadd’s twenty, but made up for this lack of quantity by the eminence of the father and grandfather whose high and hard-won position he had painlessly inherited.