Granted that Swithin took a bachelor’s view of the situation⁠—still what indeed was not due to that family in which so many had done so well for themselves, had attained a certain position? If he had heard in dark, pessimistic moments the words “yeomen” and “very small beer” used in connection with his origin, did he believe them?

No! he cherished, hugging it pathetically to his bosom, the secret theory that there was something distinguished somewhere in his ancestry.

“Must be,” he once said to young Jolyon, before the latter went to the bad. “Look at us, we’ve got on! There must be good blood in us somewhere.”