Read "The Combined Maze" by May Sinclair online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
You may say that there was something wrong somewhere, some mistake, from the very beginning, in his parentage, in the time and place and manner of his birth. It was in the early eighties, over a shabby chemist's shop in Wandsworth High Street, and it came of the union of Fulleymore Ransome, a little, middle-aged chemist, weedy, parched, furtively inebriate, and his wife Emma, the daughter of John Randall, a draper.
They called him John Randall Fulleymore Ransome, and Ranny for short.