Our Friend the Charlatan

"We have still nearly two hundred pounds a year," the whisper continued. "There's Len--but I must take him from school--" "Pooh! We'll talk about that." … "Who knows? It may be the real beginning of my career!"

Stolen theory, Rivenoak intrigue, Lady Ogram's death, and exposed marriage fuse into a charlatan plot whose last line rebrands ruin as beginning, so plot scores 86.

Lord Dymchurch was at a critical moment of his life. Discontent, the malady of the age, had taken hold upon him. No ignoble form of the disease; for his mind, naturally in accord with generous thoughts, repelled every suggestion which he recognised as of unworthy origin…

Dymchurch's turbid idealism against Dyce's adaptive plagiarism — generous soul against careerist mouth — individuates the satire's cast, so cast scores 87.

At the door of the breakfast-room, Miss Bride was approached by Lady Ogram's maid, who in an undertone informed her that Dr. Baldwin had been sent for. Lady Ogram had passed a very bad night, but did not wish it to be made known to her guests…

Thirty chapters of house and politics; illness accelerates toward exposure, but attic and dinner dilations slow the middle, so pace scores 83.

As he waited for his breakfast, never served to time, Mr. Lashmar drummed upon the window-pane, and seemed to watch a blackbird lunching with much gusto about the moist lawn of Alverholme Vicarage. But his gaze was absent and worried.

Blackbird gusto against absent gaze — mild comic exactness that sets the satiric register without slapstick — so prose scores 88.

Under the roof at Rivenoak was an attic which no one ever entered. The last person who had done so was Sir Quentin Ogram; on a certain day in eighteen hundred and--something, the baronet locked the door and put key into his pocket…

Vicarage lawn, locked sculpture attic, Rivenoak breakfast-room — influence houses that store vanity and sponsor careers, so world scores 85.

The countenance of the reverend gentleman rarely wore any other expression, for he took to heart all human miseries and follies, and lived in a ceaseless mild indignation against the tenor of the age.

Mild parental indignation foreshadows the son's louder charlatanism — inviting comic discontent before the bio-sociology theft — so hook scores 85.

…first the bio-sociological theory,--then the psychology and ethics which result from it. The book has given me a stronger impulse than anything I've read for years. It carries conviction with it. It clears one's mind of all sorts of doubts and hesitations. I always kicked at the democratic idea; now I know that I was right.

Stolen 'bio-sociology' as intellectual costume for anti-democratic careerism — idea-theft satire that anticipates ideology novels — so innov scores 91.

"Dyce! How good you are! How bravely you hear it, my own dear husband. I'll do anything, anything! We needn't have a servant. I'll work--I don't care anything if you still love me. Say you still love me!" He kissed her hair. "It's certain I don't hate you."

Iris offers work and love; Dyce withholds hate and rebrands ruin as career start — ironic resilience without reform — so ending scores 88.