Upon the whole the new-comers, Harry Stanhope with Horace in his wake, behaved a great deal better—Fan would have said in vindication of their birth and breeding—than nearly the entire upper ten long resident in Friarton, on Oliver Constable’s declining to avail himself of their permission and his own power to join their order. Harry received the shock, made up his mind to it, and went on as if nothing had happened, and everything was the same as before. If Constable chose to be a baker, of all trades, let him. For that matter, who could hinder him? and what did it signify? Harry took it fully for granted that Constable might still preserve all the claims he had ever had to being a gentleman. Certainly Harry had not been in the habit of reckoning bakers gentlemen, though he had known great brewers who were granted the ‘Open sesame’ by his people. But he had enough modesty left to own he and his people might have been mistaken in their partial and arbitrary estimate. Unquestionably it helped Harry greatly in his judgment to be sensible that he himself continued a gentleman, in spite of his idle talk of going down in the social scale and sinking his coat of arms and all ‘the humbug’ of his former station, in the plain style and title of Harry Stanhope, yeoman. The Wrights and Fremantles of Friarton said among themselves that Oliver Constable had disappointed, nay, cheated them, in permitting them to extend to him the right-hand of fellowship on false premises. True, he had taken University honours as had been predicted of him, but he was about to degrade these honours by sinking them in trade of the most plebeian description. The fact was race, like murder, would out. Young Constable came of generations of millers and bakers, instead of masters of grammar schools and the like, and he must perforce return to the hereditary calling with its substantial profits. It had not been in scholarship to save him from his natural destiny.