Papier Mache Author:Charles Allen Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill SUBURBAN ANTIPODES Ray Stepney?he preferred Ray to the fuller Raymond?more euphonious; brighter, he said : " If a man may drop a whole name laid on onl... more »y for show, why not half one ? 'Mond is not all the world, then cut it short, in the name of common- sense, do. A counting-house is bad enough, and a colonial counting-house at that, without ana- chronising a tilt-yard into it with Raymond. Ray much better, an admirable counting-house name." A pang of regret was intoned in that reference to a tilt-yard. Nothing could have better suited the young man than to pose legitimately as Raymond in a world of chivalry and romance. From his mother he inherited this glow; from his father?Stepney, a name of wholesale import in pickles and jams. Stepney meant commerce. The son and heir of a commercial magnate must be applied to wearing his father's shoes in the world's market-place. The career was a matterof course: first commercial schooling, then college for three years, then a year in London where the great headquarters stood, a block in itself, redounding sweets and sours upon other blocks, then full-fledged through a succession of humbler branches remote, where he lit like a bird working his homeward round back to London again, to build and roost for the season in the top of his native roof-tree. To these clear lines he came with an artistic temperament forced to find its scope in places that would have been unnoticeable to characters sailing by the stars and not by a chart. He was not a reading man, and his position was a humble one, thanks to the hopeless conservatism of his father, who felt bound to inflict upon others what had been inflicted upon himself. " You are only a sucking diamond yet, my boy," said the old man ruthlessly. " Twice the number of carats, squares a...« less