Most people in this world seem to live “in character”; they have a beginning, a middle and an end, and the three are congruous one with another and true to the rules of their type. You can speak of th...

Most people in this world seem to live “in character”; they have a beginning, a middle and an end, and the three are congruous one with another and true to the rules of their type. You can speak of th...

Most people in this world seem to live “in character”; they have a beginning, a middle and an end, and the three are congruous one with another and true to the rules of their type. You can speak of th...

I write that much and look at it, and wonder whether, after all, this is any fair statement of what I am attempting in this book. I’ve given, I see, an impression that I want to make simply a hotch-po...

There came a time when I realised that Bladesover House was not all it seemed, but when I was a little boy I took the place with the entirest faith as a complete authentic microcosm. I believed that t...

I hated teatime in the housekeeper’s room more than anything else at Bladesover. And more particularly I hated it when Mrs. Mackridge and Mrs. Booch and Mrs. Latude-Fernay were staying in the house. T...

It is a little difficult to explain why I did not come to do what was the natural thing for anyone in my circumstances to do, and take my world for granted. A certain innate scepticism, I think, expla...

The school I went to was the sort of school the Bladesover system permitted. The public schools that had come into existence in the brief glow of the Renaissance had been taken possession of by the ru...

And then when I had newly passed my fourteenth birthday, came my tragic disgrace. It was in my midsummer holidays that the thing happened, and it was through the Honourable Beatrice Normandy. She had ...

Now I sit down to write my story and tell over again things in their order, I find for the first time how inconsecutive and irrational a thing the memory can be. One recalls acts and cannot recall mot...

The powers of justice in Bladesover made an extraordinary mess of my case. I have regretfully to admit that the Honourable Beatrice Normandy did, at the age of ten, betray me, abandon me, and lie most...

When I was thus banished from Bladesover House, as it was then thought for good and all, I was sent by my mother in a vindictive spirit, first to her cousin Nicodemus Frapp, and then, as a fully inden...

When I was thus banished from Bladesover House, as it was then thought for good and all, I was sent by my mother in a vindictive spirit, first to her cousin Nicodemus Frapp, and then, as a fully inden...

But I didn’t expect to have the whole meeting on Sunday turned on to me. It was. It all comes back to me, that convergence of attention, even the faint leathery smell of its atmosphere returns, and th...

I remember something, but not so much of it as I should like to recall, of my long tramp to Bladesover House. The distance from Chatham is almost exactly seventeen miles, and it took me until nearly o...

I do not remember much of my journey to Wimblehurst with my mother except the image of her as sitting bolt upright, as rather disdaining the third-class carriage in which we traveled, and how she look...

As they talked I gave my attention pretty exclusively to my uncle. I noted him in great detail. I remember now his partially unbuttoned waistcoat, as though something had occurred to distract him as h...

When I returned, my uncle had in some remarkable way become larger and central. “Tha’chu, George?” he cried, when the shop-door bell sounded. “Come right through”; and I found him, as it were, in the ...

My mother died suddenly and, it was thought by Lady Drew, inconsiderately, the following spring. Her ladyship instantly fled to Folkestone with Miss Somerville and Fison, until the funeral should be o...

That is the last I shall tell of Bladesover. The dropscene falls on that, and it comes no more as an actual presence into this novel. I did indeed go back there once again, but under circumstances qui...

So far as I can remember now, except for that one emotional phase by the graveside, I passed through all these experiences rather callously. I had already, with the facility of youth, changed my world...

So far as I can remember now, except for that one emotional phase by the graveside, I passed through all these experiences rather callously. I had already, with the facility of youth, changed my world...

So I remember my uncle in that first phase, young, but already a little fat, restless, fretful, garrulous, putting in my fermenting head all sorts of discrepant ideas. Certainly he was educational.⁠ ⁠...

We were torn apart by a financial accident to my uncle of which I did not at first grasp the full bearings. He had developed what I regarded as an innocent intellectual recreation which he called stoc...

I was left, I say, as part of the lock, stock, and barrel, at Wimblehurst with my new master, a Mr. Mantell; who plays no part in the progress of this story except in so far as he effaced my uncle’s t...

Matriculation kept me for four full days and then came an afternoon to spare, and I sought out Tottenham Court Road through a perplexing network of various and crowded streets. But this London was vas...

It pleased my uncle extremely to find I had never seen London before. He took possession of the metropolis forthwith. “London, George,” he said, “takes a lot of understanding. It’s a great place. Imme...

After I left my uncle that evening I gave way to a feeling of profound depression. My uncle and aunt seemed to me to be leading⁠—I have already used the word too often, but I must use it again⁠—dingy ...

I came to live in London, as I shall tell you, when I was nearly twenty-two. Wimblehurst dwindles in perspective, is now in this book a little place far off, Bladesover no more than a small pinkish sp...

I came to live in London, as I shall tell you, when I was nearly twenty-two. Wimblehurst dwindles in perspective, is now in this book a little place far off, Bladesover no more than a small pinkish sp...

I had come to London as a scholar. I had taken the Vincent Bradley scholarship of the Pharmaceutical Society, but I threw this up when I found that my work of the Science and Art Department in mathema...

How well I remember the first morning, a bright Sunday morning in early October, when I raided in upon Ewart! I found my old schoolfellow in bed in a room over an oil-shop in a back street at the foot...

Ewart, as the embodiment of talk, was certainly a leading factor in my conspicuous failure to go on studying. Social theory in its first crude form of Democratic Socialism gripped my intelligence more...

The affair was immensely serious and commanding to me. I don’t remember that in these earlier phases I had any thought of turning back at all. It was clear to me that she regarded me with an eye entir...

Well, you begin to understand my breakdown now, I have been copious enough with these apologia. My work got more and more spiritless, my behaviour degenerated, my punctuality declined; I was more and ...

Throughout my student days I had not seen my uncle. I refrained from going to him in spite of an occasional regret that in this way I estranged myself from my aunt Susan, and I maintained a sulky atti...

Throughout my student days I had not seen my uncle. I refrained from going to him in spite of an occasional regret that in this way I estranged myself from my aunt Susan, and I maintained a sulky atti...

I seem to remember very quick changes of mind after that lunch. The muzzy exaltation of the unaccustomed stimulants gave way very rapidly to a model of pellucid and impartial clairvoyance which is one...

I didn’t succumb without a struggle to my uncle’s allurements. Indeed, I held out for a week while I contemplated life and my prospects. It was a crowded and muddled contemplation. It invaded even my ...

Ewart as a moral influence was unsatisfactory. I had made up my mind to put the whole thing before him, partly to see how he took it, and partly to hear how it sounded when it was said. I asked him to...

It came to me in the small hours that the real moral touchstone for this great doubting of mind was Marion. I lay composing statements of my problem and imagined myself delivering them to her⁠—and she...

At last I went to the address my uncle had given me in Gower Street, and found my aunt Susan waiting tea for him. Directly I came into the room I appreciated the change in outlook that the achievement...

So I made my peace with my uncle, and we set out upon this bright enterprise of selling slightly injurious rubbish at one-and-three-halfpence and two-and-nine a bottle, including the Government stamp....

So I made my peace with my uncle, and we set out upon this bright enterprise of selling slightly injurious rubbish at one-and-three-halfpence and two-and-nine a bottle, including the Government stamp....

As I look back at them now, those energetic years seem all compacted to a year or so; from the days of our first hazardous beginning in Farringdon Street with barely a thousand pounds’ worth of stuff ...

As I look back on those days in which we built up the great Tono-Bungay property out of human hope and credit for bottles and rent and printing, I see my life as it were arranged in two parallel colum...

As I look back on those days in which we built up the great Tono-Bungay property out of human hope and credit for bottles and rent and printing, I see my life as it were arranged in two parallel colum...

Well, these general explanations will enable the reader to understand the distressful times we two had together when presently I began to feel on a footing with Marion and to fumble conversationally f...

The next day I did an unexampled thing. I sent a telegram to my uncle, “Bad temper not coming to business,” and set off for Highgate and Ewart. He was actually at work⁠—on a bust of Millie, and seemed...

I forget how many days intervened between that last breaking off of our engagement and Marion’s surrender. But I recall now the sharpness of my emotion, the concentrated spirit of tears and laughter i...

Who can tell the story of the slow estrangement of two married people, the weakening of first this bond and then that of that complex contact? Least of all can one of the two participants. Even now, w...

The end of our intolerable situation came suddenly and unexpectedly, but in a way that I suppose was almost inevitable. My alienated affections wandered, and I was unfaithful to Marion. I won’t preten...

I came back after a week’s absence to my home again⁠—a changed man. I had lived out my first rush of passion for Effie, had come to a contemplation of my position. I had gauged Effie’s place in the sc...

Then presently we resumed our monstrous, momentous dialogue. I can’t now make out how long that dialogue went on. It spread itself, I know, in heavy fragments over either three days or four. I remembe...

The perplexing thing about life is the irresolvable complexity of reality, of things and relations alike. Nothing is simple. Every wrong done has a certain justice in it, and every good deed has dregs...

So I parted from Marion at an extremity of perturbation and regret, and went, as I had promised and arranged, to Effie, who was waiting for me in apartments near Orpington. I remember her upon the sta...

But before I finish this chapter and book altogether and go on with the great adventure of my uncle’s career, I may perhaps tell what else remains to tell of Marion and Effie, and then for a time set ...

But now that I resume the main line of my story it may be well to describe the personal appearance of my uncle as I remember him during those magnificent years that followed his passage from trade to ...

But now that I resume the main line of my story it may be well to describe the personal appearance of my uncle as I remember him during those magnificent years that followed his passage from trade to ...

But now that I resume the main line of my story it may be well to describe the personal appearance of my uncle as I remember him during those magnificent years that followed his passage from trade to ...

It illustrates the romantic element in modern commerce that my uncle met young Moggs at a city dinner⁠—I think it was the Bottle-makers’ Company⁠—when both were some way advanced beyond the initial so...

When I think of my uncle near the days of his Great Boom and in connection with the actualities of his enterprises, I think of him as I used to see him in the suite of rooms he occupied in the Harding...

I pass the Hardingham ever and again and glance aside through the great archway at the fountain and the ferns, and think of those receding days when I was so near the centre of our eddy of greed and e...

All sorts of things came to the Hardingham and offered themselves to my uncle. Gordon-Nasmyth stands but only because he played a part at last in the crisis of our fortunes. So much came to us that it...

There comes back, too, among these Hardingham memories, an impression of a drizzling November day, and how we looked out of the windows upon a procession of the London unemployed. It was like looking ...

So far my history of my aunt and uncle has dealt chiefly with his industrial and financial exploits. But side by side with that history of inflation from the infinitesimal to the immense is another de...

So far my history of my aunt and uncle has dealt chiefly with his industrial and financial exploits. But side by side with that history of inflation from the infinitesimal to the immense is another de...

I look into the jumbled stores of the middle distance of memory, and Beckenham seems to me a quite transitory phase. But really they were there several years; through nearly all my married life, in fa...

A few such pictures of those early days at Beckenham stand out, and then I find myself among the Chiselhurst memories. The Chiselhurst mansion had “grounds” rather than a mere garden, and there was a ...

“What do you think of it, George?” he insisted. What I said I thought of it I don’t now recall. Only I have very distinctly the impression of meeting for a moment my aunt’s impenetrable eye. And anyho...

So it was we recognised our new needs as fresh invaders of the upper levels of the social system, and set ourselves quite consciously to the acquisition of Style and Savoir Faire. We became part of wh...

For me, at least, it marked an epoch in my uncle’s career when I learnt one day that he had “shopped” Lady Grove. I realised a fresh, wide, unpreluded step. He took me by surprise with the sudden chan...

It seems to me now but a step from the buying of Lady Grove to the beginning of Crest Hill, from the days when the former was a stupendous achievement to the days when it was too small and dark and in...

People say that my uncle lost his head at the crest of his fortunes, but if one may tell so much truth of a man one has in a manner loved, he never had very much head to lose. He was always imaginativ...

My uncle was not altogether swallowed up in business and ambition. He kept in touch with modern thought. For example, he was, I know, greatly swayed by what he called “This Overman idee, Nietzsche⁠—al...

And while I neglected the development of my uncle’s finances⁠—and my own, in my scientific work and my absorbing conflict with the difficulties of flying⁠—his schemes grew more and more expansive and ...

For nearly all the time that my uncle was incubating and hatching Crest Hill I was busy in a little transverse valley between that great beginning and Lady Grove with more and more costly and ambitiou...

For nearly all the time that my uncle was incubating and hatching Crest Hill I was busy in a little transverse valley between that great beginning and Lady Grove with more and more costly and ambitiou...

I had gone far beyond that initial stage; I had had two smashes and a broken rib which my aunt nursed with great energy, and was getting some reputation in the aeronautic world when, suddenly, as thou...

“Oh, Crikey!” said my aunt, reading a letter behind her coffee-machine. “Here’s a young woman, George!” We were breakfasting together in the big window bay at Lady Grove that looks upon the iris beds;...

All my later work in aeronautics is associated in my memory with the quality of Beatrice, with her incidental presence, with things she said and did and things I thought of that had reference to her. ...

But my story has made a jump from June to October, and during that time my relations with Beatrice and the countryside that was her setting had developed in many directions. She came and went, moving ...

After that the spirit of our relations changed. The old ease had gone. She came to me less frequently, and when she came she would have someone with her, usually old Carnaby, and he would do the bulk ...

But I was only beginning to gauge the unaccountable elements in Beatrice. For a week after my return to Lady Grove I had no sign of her, and then she called with Lady Osprey and brought a huge bunch o...

“We got to make a fight for it,” said my uncle. “We got to face the music!” I remember that even at the sight of him I had a sense of impending calamity. He sat under the electric light with the shado...

“We got to make a fight for it,” said my uncle. “We got to face the music!” I remember that even at the sight of him I had a sense of impending calamity. He sat under the electric light with the shado...

I had a ridiculous persuasion that I was “saving the situation.” “I’m going,” I said quite consciously and dramatically. I saw the whole affair⁠—how shall I put it?⁠—in American colours. I sat down be...

That expedition to Mordet Island stands apart from all the rest of my life, detached, a piece by itself with an atmosphere of its own. It would, I suppose, make a book by itself⁠—it has made a fairly ...

All these African memories stand by themselves. It was for me an expedition into the realms of undisciplined nature out of the world that is ruled by men, my first bout with that hot side of our mothe...

Sooner or later the ridiculous embargo that now lies upon all the coast eastward of Mordet Island will be lifted and the reality of the deposits of quap ascertained. I am sure that we were merely taki...

A day or so after we had got to work upon the quap I found myself so sleepless and miserable that the ship became unendurable. Just before the rush of sunrise I borrowed Pollack’s gun, walked down the...

We were none too soon. People had been reconnoitring us, the telegraph had been at work, and we were not four hours at sea before we ran against the gunboat that had been sent down the coast to look f...

That evening I talked with my uncle in the Hardingham for the last time. The atmosphere of the place had altered quite shockingly. Instead of the crowd of importunate courtiers there were just half a ...

That evening I talked with my uncle in the Hardingham for the last time. The atmosphere of the place had altered quite shockingly. Instead of the crowd of importunate courtiers there were just half a ...

That evening I talked with my uncle in the Hardingham for the last time. The atmosphere of the place had altered quite shockingly. Instead of the crowd of importunate courtiers there were just half a ...

My return home to Lady Grove was a very different thing from what I had anticipated when I had got out to sea with my load of quap and fancied the Perfect-Filament was safe within my grasp. As I walke...

I was roused from such thoughts by the sound of footsteps behind me. I turned half hopeful⁠—so foolish is a lover’s imagination, and stopped amazed. It was my uncle. His face was white⁠—white as I had...

That memory of my uncle at the gate is very clear and full. I am able to recall even the undertow of my thoughts while he was speaking. I remember my pity and affection for him in his misery growing a...

The incidents of our flight in Lord Roberts β do not arrange themselves in any consecutive order. To think of that adventure is like dipping haphazard into an album of views. One is reminded first of ...

But if I find it hard to tell the story of our long flight through the air overseas, at least that dawn in France stands cold and clear and full. I see again almost as if I saw once more with my bodil...

And now my story converges on what, in that queer corner of refuge out of the world, was destined to be my uncle’s deathbed. There is a background of the Pyrenees, of blue hills and sunlit houses, of ...

It was dark night when I left his deathbed and went back to my own inn down the straggling street of Luzon. That return to my inn sticks in my memory also as a thing apart, as an experience apart. Wit...

Last belated figure in that grouping round my uncle’s deathbed is my aunt. When it was beyond all hope that my uncle could live I threw aside whatever concealment remained to us and telegraphed direct...

When I came back I found that my share in the escape and death of my uncle had made me for a time a notorious and even popular character. For two weeks I was kept in London “facing the music,” as he w...

When I came back I found that my share in the escape and death of my uncle had made me for a time a notorious and even popular character. For two weeks I was kept in London “facing the music,” as he w...

Love, like everything else in this immense process of social disorganisation in which we live, is a thing adrift, a fruitless thing broken away from its connections. I tell of this love affair here be...

I asked her to marry me once again. It was our last morning together, and we had met very early, about sunrise, knowing that we were to part. No sun shone that day. The sky was overcast, the morning c...

That should have been the last I saw of her, but, indeed, I was destined to see her once again. Two days after I was at Lady Grove, I forget altogether upon what errand, and as I walked back to the st...

I have tried throughout all this story to tell things as they happened to me. In the beginning⁠—the sheets are still here on the table, grimy and dogs-eared and old-looking⁠—I said I wanted to tell my...

I have tried throughout all this story to tell things as they happened to me. In the beginning⁠—the sheets are still here on the table, grimy and dogs-eared and old-looking⁠—I said I wanted to tell my...

Concurrently with writing the last chapter of this book I have been much engaged by the affairs of a new destroyer we have completed. It has been an oddly complementary alternation of occupations. Thr...

This is the note I have tried to emphasise, the note that sounds clear in my mind when I think of anything beyond the purely personal aspects of my story. It is a note of crumbling and confusion, of c...

It was morning and day before I returned with the four sick and starving journalists who had got permission to come with me, up the shining river, and past the old grey Tower.⁠ ⁠… I recall the back vi...