Mrs. Pendyce leaned back in her chair smiling, and wrinkling her fine,
thin nose.

"Delicious!" she said, but her eyes did not leave her son's face, and in
them was still that vague alarm.




CHAPTER IV

THE HAPPY HUNTING-GROUND

Of all the places where, by a judicious admixture of whip and spur,
oats and whisky, horses are caused to place one leg before another with
unnecessary rapidity, in order that men may exchange little pieces of
metal with the greater freedom, Newmarket Heath is "the topmost, and
merriest, and best."

This museum of the state of flux--the secret reason of horse-racing
being to afford an example of perpetual motion (no proper racing-man
having ever been found to regard either gains or losses in the light of
an accomplished fact)--this museum of the state of flux has a climate
unrivalled for the production of the British temperament.

Not without a due proportion of that essential formative of character,
east wind, it has at once the hottest sun, the coldest blizzards, the
wettest rain, of any place of its size in the "three kingdoms." It
tends--in advance even of the City of London--to the nurture and
improvement of individualism, to that desirable "I'll see you d---d"