While railing, wherever he found ears into which to rail, against the vicious luxury and sordid shallowness of the upper middle classes, his instinctive desire to shine above his poorer associates had sent Phyllis to an upper middle class school.

Now Gedge had a certain amount of bookish and political intelligence.

Phyllis inheriting the intellectual equipment of her sentimental fool of a mother, had none, Oh! she had a vast fund of ordinary commonsense.

Of that I can assure you.

A bit of hard brain fibre from her father had counteracted any over-sentimental folly in the maternal heritage.