ess of the whole concern. I still
clung to the idea that the world of men was or should be a sane and just
organisation, and the idea that I should set myself gravely, just at
the fine springtime of my life, to developing a monstrous bottling and
packing warehouse, bottling rubbish for the consumption of foolish,
credulous and depressed people, had in it a touch of insanity. My early
beliefs still clung to me. I felt assured that somewhere there must be
a hitch in the fine prospect of ease and wealth under such conditions;
that somewhere, a little overgrown, perhaps, but still traceable, lay a
neglected, wasted path of use and honour for me.

My inclination to refuse the whole thing increased rather than
diminished at first as I went along the Embankment. In my uncle's
presence there had been a sort of glamour that had prevented an outright
refusal. It was a revival of affection for him I felt in his presence, I
think, in part, and in part an instinctive feeling that I must consider
him as my host. But much more was it a curious persuasion he had the
knack of inspiring--a persuasion not so much of his integrity and
capacity as of the reciprocal and yielding foolishness of the world. One
felt that he was silly and wild, but in some way silly and wild after
the fashion of the universe. After all, one must live somehow. I
astonished him and myself by temporising.

"No," said I, "I'll think it over!"

And as I went along the embankment the first effect was all against
my uncle. He shrank--for a little while he continued to shrink--in
perspective until he was only a very small shabby little man in a dirty
back street, sending off a few hundred bottles of rubbish to foolish
buyers. The great buildings on the right of us, the Inns and the School
Board place--as it was then--Somerset House, the big hotels, the great
bridges, Westminster's outlines ahead, had an effect of grey largeness
that reduced him to the proportions of a busy black beetle in a crack in
the floor.

And then my eye caught the advertisements on the south side of "Sorber's
Food," of "Cracknell's Ferric Wine," very bright and prosperous signs,
illuminated at night, and I realised how astonishingly they looked at
home there, how evidently part they were in the whole thing.

I saw a man come charging out of Palace Yard--the policeman touched his
helmet to him--with a hat and a bearing astonishingly like my uncle's.
After all,--didn't Cracknell himself sit in