the House?

Tono-Bungay shouted at me from a hoarding near Adelphi Terrace; I saw
it afar off near Carfax Street; it cried out again upon me in Kensington
High Street, and burst into a perfect clamour; six or seven times I
saw it as I drew near my diggings. It certainly had an air of being
something more than a dream.

Yes, I thought it over--thoroughly enough.... Trade rules the world.
Wealth rather than trade! The thing was true, and true too was my
uncle's proposition that the quickest way to get wealth is to sell the
cheapest thing possible in the dearest bottle. He was frightfully right
after all. Pecunnia non olet,--a Roman emperor said that. Perhaps my
great heroes in Plutarch were no more than such men, fine now only
because they are distant; perhaps after all this Socialism to which I
had been drawn was only a foolish dream, only the more foolish because
all its promises were conditionally true. Morris and these others
played with it wittingly; it gave a zest, a touch of substance, to their
aesthetic pleasures. Never would there be good faith enough to bring
such things about. They knew it; every one, except a few young fools,
knew it. As I crossed the corner of St. James's Park wrapped in thought,
I dodged back just in time to escape a prancing pair of greys. A stout,
common-looking woman, very magnificently dressed, regarded me from the
carriage with a scornful eye. "No doubt," thought I, "a pill-vendor's
wife...."

Running through all my thoughts, surging out like a refrain, was my
uncle's master-stroke, his admirable touch of praise: "Make it all
slick--and then make it go Woosh. I know you can! Oh! I KNOW you can!"

IV

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 come and eat
with me in an Italian place near Panton Street where one could get a
curious, interesting, glutting sort of dinner for eighteen-pence. He
came with a disconcerting black-eye that he wouldn't explain. "Not so
much a black-eye," he said, "as the aftermath of a purple patch....
What's your difficulty?"

"I'll tell you with the salad," I said.

But as a matter of fact I didn't tell him. I threw out that I was
doubtful whether I ought to go into trade, or stick to teaching in
view of my deepening socialist proclivities; and he, warming with the
unaccustomed generosity of a si