The Midden

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It was Timothy Bright's ambition to make a fortune. He had been brought up in the belief that every Bright had made a fortune and it seemed only natural to suppose he was going to make one too. All his life the evidence of the family's success had been around him, in the houses all Brights he knew lived in, in the furnishings of those houses, in their acres and ornamental gardens, in the portraits of Bright ancestors on the walls of Bright mansions, and above all in the stories the Brights told of their forebears whose exploits over the centuries had amassed the wealth that allowed contemporary Brights to live so very comfortably. Timothy never tired of hearing those stories. Not that he fully understood their import. And he certainly didn't understand that twentieth-century Brights, and in particular his father's generation, had done practically nothing to increase or even maintain that wealth. In fact, thanks to their public school education and the smug conceit this engendered in them, they had done a great deal to waste the family finances and influence. They had also done the country no great service by wasting themselves. While the older and politically influential Brights had used their peculiar talents to ensure that wars were almost certain to take place, the younger members of the family had died with courageous idiocy on the battlefields. Whether this had helped the family finances no one could be entirely sure, but what wars and their own preference for playing games and killing birds instead of thinking and working hadn't done, death duties and indolent stupidity had.

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