That's something.' And he fell to thinking, with that half-ironic depreciation which he allowed to himself, and would have stood from no one else, of his own brand-new Georgian house, built from the plans of a famous American architect, ten years before the war, out of the profits of an abnormally successful year, and furnished in what he believed to be faultless taste by the best professional decorator he could find.
'Yet compared to a Mannering, what do I mean to the people here?
You scarcely begin to take root in this blessed country under half a century.

Mannering is exceedingly unpopular; the people think him a selfish idler; but if he chose he could whistle them back with a hundredth part of the trouble it would take me! And if Aubrey wanted to go into Parliament, he'd probably have his pick of the county divisions.

Curious fellow, Aubrey! I wonder exactly what Beryl sees in him ?' His daughter's prospects were not indeed very clear to a mind that liked everything cut and dried.

Aubrey Mannering was the Squire's eldest son; but the Squire was not rich, and had been for years past wasting his money on Greek antiquities, which seemed to his neighbours, including Sir Henry Chicksands, a very dubious investment.

If Aubrey should want to sell, who was going to buy such things at high prices after the war?
No doubt prices at Christie's--for good stuff--had been keeping up very well.