family tradition; his maternal grandfather had been a Scotch baronet with a distinguished military career in India—a fact which was piously embodied in the Memorial Tablet to his mother in Butley Church. As for his father—“old Captain Huxtable”—(whom I could hazily remember, white-whiskered and formidable) he had been a regular roaring martinet of the gouty old school of retired officers, and his irascibilities were still legendary in our neighbourhood. He used to knock his coachman’s hat off and stamp on it. “The young Captain,” as he was called in former days, had profited by these paroxysms, and where the parent would have bellowed “God damn and blast it all” at his bailiff, the son permitted himself nothing more sulphurous than “confound,” and would have thought twice before telling even the most red-hot Socialist to go to the devil.
Walking round the garden after tea—Aunt Evelyn drawing his attention to her delphiniums and he waggishly affirming their inferiority to his own—I wondered whether I had exaggerated the “callous complacency” of those at home. What could elderly people do except try and make the best of their inability to