ono-Bungay," said my uncle very slowly and distinctly.

I thought he was asking me to hear some remote, strange noise. "I don't
hear anything," I said reluctantly to his expectant face. He smiled
undefeated. "Try again," he said, and repeated, "Tono-Bungay."

"Oh, THAT!" I said.

"Eh?" said he.

"But what is it?"

"Ah!" said my uncle, rejoicing and expanding. "What IS it? That's
what you got to ask? What won't it be?" He dug me violently in what he
supposed to be my ribs. "George," he cried--"George, watch this place!
There's more to follow."

And that was all I could get from him.

That, I believe, was the very first time that the words Tono-Bungay ever
heard on earth--unless my uncle indulged in monologues in his chamber--a
highly probable thing. Its utterance certainly did not seem to me at the
time to mark any sort of epoch, and had I been told this word was the
Open Sesame to whatever pride and pleasure the grimy front of London hid
from us that evening, I should have laughed aloud.

"Coming now to business," I said after a pause, and with a chill sense
of effort; and I opened the question of his trust.

My uncle sighed, and leant back in his chair. "I wish I could make all
this business as clear to you as it is to me," he said. "However--Go on!
Say what you have to say."

VII

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 lives. They
seemed to be adrift in a limitless crowd of dingy people, wearing shabby
clothes, living uncomfortably in shabby second-hand houses, going to and
fro on pavements that had always a thin veneer of greasy, slippery mud,
under grey skies that showed no gleam of hope of anything for them but
dinginess until they died. It seemed absolutely clear to me that my
mother's little savings had been swallowed up and that my own prospect
was all too certainly to drop into and be swallowed up myself sooner
or later by this dingy London ocean. The London that was to be an
adventurous escape from the slumber of Wimblehurst, had vanished from my
dreams. I saw my uncle pointing to the houses in Park Lane and showing
a frayed shirt-cuff as he did so. I heard my aunt: "I'm to ride in my
carriage then. So he old says."

My feelings towards my uncle were extraordinarily mixed. I was intensely
sorry not only for my aunt Susan but for him--for