Sorrell and Son by Warwick Deeping

Mr. Christopher Sorrell traveled down to Millchester by an afternoon train, and found Pentreath's car waiting for him at the station. Pentreath's suspiciously minded chauffeur met Sorrell without troubling to salute him in any way, and allowed the porter to dispose of Kit's suit-case.

Kit had given the chauffeur a smile, and one quick, discriminating glance. He had learnt to place men and women with a shrewdness shorn of all sentimental illusions. He had observed and handled and smelt them for years in the out-patient departments of St. Martha's. He had seen them cringe and swagger and pretend, and try to hide what it was madness to hide; and he had learnt to tell false faces from true ones, and to know almost by instinct when someone was lying. He had his gallery of "types, " and the fellow at the wheel in front of him was a rodent, a nasty, acute little man of the Nosey Parker genus, very self-pleased, with one of those long, intrusive noses, a patch of raddled red on each cheek bone, and bright, insolent, treacherous little eyes.