caste in consequence. His one object in life was to undo the mischief wrought by circumstances. He could not boast of a long line of ancestry; in fact, on one occasion when in a reminiscent mood he had remarked:
"I had a grandfather"
"Had you?" was the scathing comment of another man. The story had been retailed with great gusto among the men of St. Joseph's.
Reginald Graves was a snob, which prompted him to believe that all men were snobs. Burke's Peerage and Kelly's Landed Gentry were at once his inspiration and his cross. He used them constantly himself, looking up the ancestry of every man he met. He was convinced that his lack of "family" was responsible for his unpopularity.
In his opinion, failing "blood" the next best thing to possess was money, and he lost no opportunity of throwing out dark and covert hints as to the enormous wealth possessed by the Graves and Williams families, Williams being his mother's maiden name.
His favourite boast, however, was of an uncle in Australia. Josiah Williams had, according to Graves, emigrated many years before. Fortune dogged his footsteps with almost embarrassing persistence until, at the time that his nephew Reginald went up to Oxford, he was a man of almost incredible wealth. He owned
