Shlesinger was a middle-aged widow, quiet and soothing, with her thoughts all taken up by her six-year-old child, as a mother's thoughts are likely to be in a boat which has an open rail for a bulwark.

The Reverend John Stuart was a Nonconformist minister from Birmingham--either a Presbyterian or a Congregationalist--a man of immense stoutness, slow and torpid in his ways, but blessed with a considerable fund of homely humour, which made him, I am told, a very favourite preacher, and an effective speaker from advanced Radical platforms.
Finally, there was Mr.James Stephens, a Manchester solicitor (junior partner of Hickson, Ward, and Stephens), who was travelling to shake off the effects of an attack of influenza.

Stephens was a man who, in the course of thirty years, had worked himself up from cleaning the firm's windows to managing its business.

For most of that long time he had been absolutely immersed in dry, technical work, living with the one idea of satisfying old clients and attracting new ones, until his mind and soul had become as formal and precise as the laws which he expounded.

A fine and sensitive nature was in danger of being as warped as a busy city man's is liable to become.