r nothing....

In spite of my preoccupation with my experiments, work, I did, I find
now that I come to ransack my impressions, see a great deal of the great
world during those eventful years; I had a near view of the machinery
by which an astounding Empire is run, rubbed shoulders and exchanged
experiences with bishops and statesmen, political women and women who
were not political, physicians and soldiers, artists and authors, the
directors of great journals, philanthropists and all sorts of eminent,
significant people. I saw the statesmen without their orders and the
bishops with but a little purple silk left over from their canonicals,
inhaling, not incensen but cigar smoke. I could look at them all the
better because, for the most part, they were not looking at me but at my
uncle, and calculating consciously or unconsciously how they might use
him and assimilate him to their system, the most unpremeditated, subtle,
successful and aimless plutocracy that ever encumbered the destinies of
mankind. Not one of them, so far as I could see, until disaster overtook
him, resented his lies, his almost naked dishonesty of method, the
disorderly disturbance of this trade and that, caused by his spasmodic
operations. I can see them now about him, see them polite, watchful,
various; his stiff compact little figure always a centre of
attention, his wiry hair, his brief nose, his under-lip, electric with
self-confidence. Wandering marginally through distinguished gatherings,
I would catch the whispers: "That's Mr. Ponderevo!"

"The little man?"

"Yes, the little bounder with the glasses."

"They say he's made--"...

Or I would see him on some parterre of a platform beside my aunt's
hurraying hat, amidst titles and costumes, "holding his end up," as
he would say, subscribing heavily to obvious charities, even at times
making brief convulsive speeches in some good cause before the most
exalted audiences. "Mr. Chairman, your Royal Highness, my Lords, Ladies
and Gentlemen,"`he would begin amidst subsiding applause and adjust
those obstinate glasses and thrust back the wings of his frock-coat and
rest his hands upon his hips and speak his fragment with ever and again
an incidental Zzzz. His hands would fret about him as he spoke, fiddle
his glasses, feel in his waistcoat pockets; ever and again he would rise
slowly to his toes as a sentence unwound jerkily like a clockwork snake,
and drop back on his heels at the end. They were th