our efforts have made them now, grey quiet displays.

Well, I don't intend to write down here the tortuous financial history
of Moggs' Limited, which was our first development of Moggs and Sons;
nor will I tell very much of how from that we spread ourselves with
a larger and larger conception throughout the chandlery and minor
ironmongery, how we became agents for this little commodity, partners in
that, got a tentacle round the neck of a specialised manufacturer or so,
secured a pull upon this or that supply of raw material, and so prepared
the way for our second flotation, Domestic Utilities; "Do it,"
they reordered it in the city. And then came the reconstruction of
Tono-Bungay, and then "Household services" and the Boom!

That sort of development is not to be told in detail in a novel. I have,
indeed, told much of it elsewhere. It is to be found set out at
length, painfully at length, in my uncle's examination and mine in
the bankruptcy proceedings, and in my own various statements after his
death. Some people know everything in that story, some know it all
too well, most do not want the details, it is the story of a man of
imagination among figures, and unless you are prepared to collate
columns of pounds, shillings and pence, compare dates and check
additions, you will find it very unmeaning and perplexing. And after
all, you wouldn't find the early figures so much wrong as STRAINED. In
the matter of Moggs and Do Ut, as in the first Tono-Bungay promotion
and in its reconstruction, we left the court by city standards without
a stain on our characters. The great amalgamation of Household Services
was my uncle's first really big-scale enterprise and his first display
of bolder methods: for this we bought back Do Ut, Moggs (going strong
with a seven per cent. dividend) and acquired Skinnerton's polishes, the
Riffleshaw properties and the Runcorn's mincer and coffee-mill business.
To that Amalgamation I was really not a party; I left it to my uncle
because I was then beginning to get keen upon the soaring experiments
I had taken on from the results then to hand of Lilienthal, Pilcher and
the Wright brothers. I was developing a glider into a flyer. I meant
to apply power to this glider as soon as I could work out one or two
residual problems affecting the longitudinal stability. I knew that I
had a sufficiently light motor in my own modification of Bridger's
light turbine, but I knew too that until I had cured my aeropl