But there were others, humbler ones in Earl's Court Road or Maida Vale, where the members of the deputation had relatives whom it was natural to hunt up.

Long years and many billows had rolled between, and more effective separations had arisen in the whole difference of life; still, it was natural to hunt them up, to seek in their eyes and their hands the old subtle bond of kin, and perhaps--such is our vanity in the new lands--to show them what the stock had come to overseas.

They tended to be depressing these visits: the married sister was living in a small way; the first cousin seemed to have got into a rut; the uncle and aunt were failing, with a stooping, trembling, old-fashioned kind of decrepitude, a rigidity of body and mind, which somehow one didn't see much over home.
"England," said Poulton, the Canadian-born, "is a dangerous country to live in; you run such risks of growing old." They agreed, I fear, for more reasons than this that England was a good country to leave early; and you cannot blame them--there was not one of them who did not offer in his actual person proof of what he said.

Their own dividing chance grew dramatic in their eyes.
"I was offered a clerkship with the Cunards the day before I sailed," said McGill.

"Great Scott, if I'd taken that clerkship!" He saw all his glorious past, I suppose, in a suburban aspect.
"I was kicked out," said Cameron, "and it was the kindest attention my father ever paid me;" and Bates remarked that it was worth coming out second-class, as he did, to go back in the best cabin in the ship.
The appearance and opinions of those they had left behind them prompted them to this kind of congratulation, with just a thought of compunction at the back of it for their own better fortunes.