Traditionally of Danish origin, its men folk had as a rule bright
reddish-brown hair, red cheeks, large round heads, excellent teeth and
poor morals. They had done their best for the population of any county
in which they had settled; their offshoots swarmed. Born in the
early twenties of the nineteenth century, Sylvanus Heythorp, after an
education broken by escapades both at school and college, had fetched
up in that simple London of the late forties, where claret, opera, and
eight per cent. for your money ruled a cheery roost. Made partner in his
shipping firm well before he was thirty, he had sailed with a wet sheet
and a flowing tide; dancers, claret, Cliquot, and piquet; a cab with a
tiger; some travel--all that delicious early-Victorian consciousness of
nothing save a golden time. It was all so full and mellow that he was
forty before he had his only love affair of any depth--with the daughter
of one of his own clerks, a liaison so awkward as to necessitate a
sedulous concealment. The death of that girl, after three years, leaving
him a natural son, had been the chief, perhaps the only real, sorrow
of his life. Five years later he married. What for? God only knew! as
he was in the habit of remarking.
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