e very gestures of
our first encounter when he had stood before the empty fireplace in his
minute draped parlour and talked of my future to my mother.

In those measurelessly long hot afternoons in the little shop at
Wimblehurst he had talked and dreamt of the Romance of Modern Commerce.
Here, surely, was his romance come true.

VIII

People say that my uncle lost his head at the crest of his fortunes,
but if one may tell so much truth of a man one has in a manner loved,
he never had very much head to lose. He was always imaginative, erratic,
inconsistent, recklessly inexact, and his inundation of wealth merely
gave him scope for these qualities. It is true, indeed, that towards
the climax he became intensely irritable at times and impatient of
contradiction, but that, I think, was rather the gnawing uneasiness of
sanity than any mental disturbance. But I find it hard either to judge
him or convey the full development of him to the reader. I saw too much
of him; my memory is choked with disarranged moods and aspects. Now
he is distended with megalomania, now he is deflated, now he is
quarrelsome, now impenetrably self-satisfied, but always he is sudden,
jerky, fragmentary, energetic, and--in some subtle fundamental way that
I find difficult to define--absurd.

There stands out--because of the tranquil beauty of its setting
perhaps--a talk we had in the veranda of the little pavilion near
my worksheds behind Crest Hill in which my aeroplanes and navigable
balloons were housed. It was one of many similar conversations, and I do
not know why it in particular should survive its fellows. It happens
so. He had come up to me after his coffee to consult me about a certain
chalice which in a moment of splendour and under the importunity of
a countess he had determined to give to a deserving church in the
east-end. I, in a moment of even rasher generosity, had suggested Ewart
as a possible artist. Ewart had produced at once an admirable sketch for
the sacred vessel surrounded by a sort of wreath of Millies with open
arms and wings and had drawn fifty pounds on the strength of it. After
that came a series of vexatious delays. The chalice became less and
less of a commercial man's chalice, acquired more and more the elusive
quality of the Holy Grail, and at last even the drawing receded.

My uncle grew restive.... "You see, George, they'll begin to want the
blasted thing!"

"What blasted thing?"

"That chalice, damn it! Th