The Island Pharisees by John Galsworthy

"My dear Richard" (wrote Shelton's uncle the next day), "I shall be glad to see you at three o'clock to-morrow afternoon upon the question of your marriage settlement. " At that hour accordingly Shelton made his way to Lincoln's Inn Fields, where in fat black letters the names "Paramor and Herring (Commissioners for Oaths)" were written on the wall of a stone entrance. He ascended the solid steps with nervousness, and by a small red-haired boy was introduced to a back room on the first floor. Here, seated at a table in the very centre, as if he thereby better controlled his universe, a pug-featured gentleman, without a beard, was writing. He paused. "Ow, Mr. Richard! " he said; "glad to see you, sir. Take a chair. Your uncle will be disengaged in 'arf a minute"; and in the tone of his allusion to his employer was the satirical approval that comes with long and faithful service. "He will do everything himself," he went on, screwing up his sly, greenish, honest eyes, "and he 's not a young man."

Shelton never saw his uncle's clerk without marvelling at the prosperity deepening upon his face. In place of the look of harassment which on most faces begins to grow after the age of fifty, his old friend's countenance, as though in sympathy with the nation, had expanded -- a little greasily, a little genially, a little coarsely -- every time he met it. A contemptuous tolerance for people who were not getting on was spreading beneath its surface; it left each time a deeper feeling that its owner could never be in the wrong.