At the dinner-table I've met not simply the titled but the great. On
one occasion--it is my brightest memory--I upset my champagne over the
trousers of the greatest statesman in the empire--Heaven forbid I should
be so invidious as to name him!--in the warmth of our mutual admiration.

And once (though it is the most incidental thing in my life) I murdered
a man....

Yes, I've seen a curious variety of people and ways of living
altogether. Odd people they all are great and small, very much alike at
bottom and curiously different on their surfaces. I wish I had ranged
just a little further both up and down, seeing I have ranged so far.
Royalty must be worth knowing and very great fun. But my contacts with
princes have been limited to quite public occasions, nor at the other
end of the scale have I had what I should call an inside acquaintance
with that dusty but attractive class of people who go about on the
high-roads drunk but enfamille (so redeeming the minor lapse), in the
summertime, with a perambulator, lavender to sell, sun-brown children,
a smell, and ambiguous bundles that fire the imagination. Navvies,
farm-labourers, sailormen and stokers, all such as sit in 1834
beer-houses, are beyond me also, and I suppose must remain so now for
ever. My intercourse with the ducal rank too has been negligible; I
once went shooting with a duke, and in an outburst of what was no doubt
snobbishness, did my best to get him in the legs. But that failed.

I'm sorry I haven't done the whole lot though....

You will ask by what merit I achieved this remarkable social range,
this extensive cross-section of the British social organism. It was the
Accident of Birth. It always is in England.

Indeed, if I may make the remark so cosmic, everything is. But that is
by the way. I was my uncle's nephew, and my uncle was no less a person
than Edward Ponderevo, whose comet-like transit of the financial
heavens happened--it is now ten years ago! Do you remember the days
of Ponderevo, the great days, I mean, of Ponderevo? Perhaps you had
a trifle in some world-shaking enterprise! Then you know him only
too well. Astraddle on Tono-Bungay, he flashed athwart the empty
heavens--like a comet--rather, like a stupendous rocket!--and overawed
investors spoke of his star. At his zenith he burst into a cloud of
the most magnificent promotions. What a time that was! The Napoleon of
domestic conveniences!

I was his nephew, his peculiar and intimat