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Followed two years of palship; at the end of which their first daughter, Evelyn, was born. Peter, who had hoped for a son, felt disappointment; showed it, perhaps a little too plainly: thereby heightening his wife’s love for the kiddie. But the disappointment faded; the easy relationship renewed itself.

About this time, Ivan Turkovitch became a frequent visitor to the Lime Street warehouse. A quaint man—born in some nameless province of Austria-Hungary; speaking English with an amazing accent; small; paunchy; tawny-bearded; very neat in his clothes, in his habits—he had come to England with nothing but his wits; and built up in some subterranean manner the struggling firm of “I. Turkovitch, manufacturers of Nirvana Cigarettes.”

Turkovitch, an artist in his way, loved that business; cared less for its financial harvest than the joy of running it—with the inevitable result that, being as extravagant in his factory as he was economical in his home, he invariably found himself short of capital. Peter liked listening to the little man when he talked about his “vork peoples”; visited the factory, for the first time from curiosity, for the second time out of sheer interest. His own business existence at Jameson’s had settled down into a pretty humdrum affair. As senior partner by right of capital he drew a steady £3,000 a year; leaving Simpson to do the inside work and contenting himself with the selling end, which—as it meant pitting his brains against other people’s—rather amused him.

But when Turkovitch finally broached the point towards which he had been finessing, he found anything but a languid young capitalist to deal with. Peter Jameson was quite willing to put up the money, five thousand pounds of it if necessary (considerably more than the Hungarian either required or expected), but on one condition only—that, as majority shareholder, he should control the business.

Turkovitch, even in those early days, found Peter—with his ideas of press-advertising, of new machinery, of up-to-dateness generally—rather terrifying: but in the end, pressed by many long-suffering creditors, he yielded.

To Peter, the new concern grew swiftly from a mere plaything into a passion. He felt, for the first time, the real zest of commerce, the creative joy of it. This was no inherited money-making machine; but a task that needed a man’s every thought, all his energy: uphill work, worthy of accomplishment. Gradually it drew him, from Lime Street, from his shooting, from his riding, from his fishing, from his home. So that the coming of his second daughter, Primula, seemed to him less of a disappointment than an extraneous incident vastly concerning to Patricia, but to himself little more than item of interest.

Superficially the palship between husband and wife still existed; but the woman began to feel herself, more and more, an accessory and not a necessity to this absorbed young husband of hers. His real love, she felt, was—would always be, unless some miracle happened—Nirvana.

For the plant, irrigated and irrigated again with gold, began to grow; promised a great harvest. There were difficulties of course; but these only served to intensify Peter’s ardour. Tobacconists wouldn’t stock Nirvana—tobacconists must stock Nirvana, he would advertise until they were forced to. The export trade was hopeless, because one couldn’t get a reliable export-traveller—he, Peter Jameson, would do that part himself: and travel he did, from Christiania to Lisbon, from Aden to Shanghai, from Buenos Aires to Valparaiso. …

So the thirty thousand pounds in Jamesons dwindled to twenty thousand; and the five thousand in Nirvana rose to ten. But already, they were “round the corner,” covering expenses. True that most of the capital was represented in the balance-sheet by that intangible mystery “Goodwill and trademarks”; true that Turkovitch grumbled and Sam Bramson, “Pretty” Bramson, the newly engaged sales-manager, required more and more travellers for the home-trade, seemed to do less and less work himself; true that old Tom Simpson began to shake his head at so much voyaging and successfully urged a heavy life-assurance: still—it grew, it grew; and Peter, working fourteen hours between the two businesses, felt success very near, gloried in it. …

Meanwhile that resplendent person, Francis Gordon, wrote a “novel in verse” which excited some comment; married for caprice; lost his wife; wandered off, a not too disconsolate widower, round the world; lost most of his income; fell in love; renounced love; renouncing, found his vocation; and returned to England shortly before the opening chapter of this our romance, which now begins.

To my American readers.—“Eton College” is what we call a “public school.” Boys go at the age of 12–13 and leave at the age of 18–19. Originally founded for “poor scholars”—it has now some thousand students who pay fees of about £300 per annum each. Gilbert Frankau.