The Will and the Way by Bernard Capes — Read

Mr. Luke Redding was the son of his father in only a literal sense. For the rest, as William Grenville had implied, he was a very pretentious shoot from an unpretending stock. The Reddings for generations had been sober family solicitors in Long Wyecombe--a conservative, respected, and decently prosperous race. It was left to Luke, born into a showier and more revolutionary age, to discover the obsoleteness of the methods which had built up the practice to which he had succeeded, and which, in his opinion, obstructed its developments. He was by nature daring, resourceful, and, one must add, not too scrupulous. Money, and the pursuit of money, were in the air all about him. His ambitions stretched far beyond the hum-drum routine of a country office, and the times lent themselves to his ambitions. The unsavoury spirit, petrol, had come relatively to obliterate space; and the local interests of many of his clients were transferred, in consequence, to the metropolis. Thither, he thought it his policy to follow them, and, for the first time in their history, Reddings possessed a London office.

But wealth, it is notorious, is, by some immutable law, attracted only to wealthy and Luke had himself to appear rich if he would secure the suffrages of the rich. His resources proved unequal to the strain. He did his best, while the structure of his original fortune held, hiding under ostentatious show the increasing unsteadiness of the fabric. But balances, especially bankers' balances, are hard things to maintain on slippery ground, and Luke, in the effort to keep his poised between London and Long Wyecombe, found it presently to be on the verge of an upset.