John recounts how his mother met Alfred Inglethorp-through her many "hundreds" of charitable committees-and how Alfred is a distant cousin of his mother's close friend and confidante, Evelyn Howard. John also informs Hastings that his brother Lawrence has abandoned the medical profession, despite having completed his degree and earned his license, in order to write and publish his poems, which John claims are nothing remarkable. Emily Cavendish (now Inglethorp) is not the biological mother of John and his younger brother, Lawrence she is their step-mother, but she wed their father, a widower, when they were only boys. Hastings, as narrator, also provides the reader with some noteworthy background on the Cavendish family-Mrs. Hastings and John have a brief conversation in which John updates Hastings on his family's affairs: his mother has married a man twenty years her junior, Alfred Inglethorp, a man of whom John and the rest of his mother's close relations are highly suspicious-some are even downright hostile-because it seems clear to them that he is only interested in being married to her to benefit from her prodigious fortune and eventually inherit it for himself. He runs into an old acquaintance by the name of John Cavendish, a former barrister turned country squire and heir to the Styles estate, a place where Hastings had often stayed as a child. Captain Arthur Hastings is staying at a convalescent home after incurring an injury in World War One, and after mostly recuperating, he's been granted a month's sick leave.
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