His respectability was spontaneous and sudden, a rebellion against rebellion.

He came of a family of cranks, in which all the oldest people had all the newest notions.

One of his uncles always walked about without a hat, and another had made an unsuccessful attempt to walk about with a hat and nothing else.

His father cultivated art and self-realisation; his mother went in for simplicity and hygiene.

Hence the child, during his tenderer years, was wholly unacquainted with any drink between the extremes of absinth and cocoa, of both of which he had a healthy dislike.