But, in spite of Mr. Pargent’s extreme literary modernity, his surroundings and circumstances were typically mid-Victorian. His age was between fifty and sixty, and he lived with his sister Clara in a tall, narrow house in Bavaria Square, Bayswater. It was, as a matter of fact, the house in which he and his two sisters had been born. On their parents’ death he and Miss Clara Pargent had elected to remain where they were and keep house together. Miss Margaret, younger and more adventurous, had taken unto herself a companion⁠—of the female sex⁠—and migrated to a house in the little town of West Laverhurst, in Wiltshire.

It will be gathered from this that the Pargent family were not dependent upon Mr. Richard Pargent’s literary earnings. Each member of it was comparatively well off, and lived according to the standards of mid-Victorian comfort. In their own phrase, they knew quite a number of nice people, and sometimes they found it difficult to make time in which to perform all their social duties. As a consequence, they had little opportunity left for doing anything useful.