Indeed, in Daneford it was almost unnecessary to add the banker's surname to his Christian name; and if anyone said, "Wat did so-and-so," and you asked, "Wat who?" the purveyor of the news would know you for an alien or a nobody in the city. The young men worshipped him as one of themselves, who, despite his gaiety and lightheartedness, had prospered in the world, and kept his youth and made his money, and was one of themselves still, and would continue to be one of them as long as he lived. Elder men liked him for the solid prudence which guided all his business transactions, and which, while it enabled him to be with the young, allowed him to exercise over his juniors in years the influence of an equal combined with the authority of experience. Lads of twenty never thought of him as a fogey, and men of thirty looked upon him as a younger man, who had learned the folly of vicious vanities very much sooner than others; and consequently they confided in him, and submitted themselves to him with docility. Young men assembled at his house, but there were no orgies; elder men came, and went away cheered and diverted, and no whit the less rich or wise because discussions of important matters had been enlivened with interludes of gayer discourse. Wat Grey was one of the most active men in Daneford. He was Chairman of the Chamber of Commerce, of the Commercial Club, and of the Harbour Board. He was Vice-chairman of the Daneford Boat Club, and Treasurer of the Poor's Christmas Coal Fund. If he was rich, he was liberal. He subscribed splendidly to all the local charities, but never as a public man or as owner of the Daneford Bank. What he thought it wise to give he always sent from "Wat," as though he prized more highly the distinction of familiarity his town had conferred upon him than any conventional array of Christian and surnames, or any title of cold courtesy or routine right. It was not often he dropped from his cheerful level of high-spirited and rich animal enjoyment into sentimentalism, but on one occasion he said to young Feltoe: "I'd rather be 'Wat' to my friends than Sir Thingumbob Giggamarigs to all the rest of the world." There was nothing Daneford could have refused him. He had been mayor, and could be Liberal member of Parliament for the ancient and small constituency any time he chose when the Liberal seat was vacant. Daneford was one of those constituencies which give one hand to one side and the other hand to the other, and have no hand free for action. Walter Grey had always declined the seat; he would say: "I'm too young yet, far too young. As I grow older, I shall grow wiser and more corrupt. Then you can put me in, and I shall have great pleasure in ratting for a baronetcy. Ha, ha, ha!"