My father had had the undesirable touch, not of the genius, but of the Bohemian.

The Grangers of Etchingham had cut him adrift and he had swum to sink in other seas.

Now I was the last of the Grangers and, as things went, was quite the best known of all of them.

They had grown poor in their generation; they bade fair to sink, even as, it seemed, I bade fair to rise, and I had come back to the old places on the arm of one of the great ones of the earth.
I wondered what the portentous old woman who ruled alone in Etchingham thought of these times--the portentous old woman who ruled, so they said, the place with a rod of iron; who made herself unbearable to her companions and had to fall back upon an unfortunate niece.

I wondered idly who the niece could be; certainly not a Granger of Etchingham, for I was the only one of the breed.