far less egregious smash if there had
been no Napoleonic legend to misguide him. He was in many ways better
and infinitely kinder than his career. But when in doubt between
decent conduct and a base advantage, that cult came in more and more
influentially: "think of Napoleon; think what the inflexibly-wilful
Napoleon would have done with such scruples as yours;" that was the
rule, and the end was invariably a new step in dishonour.

My uncle was in an unsystematic way a collector of Napoleonic relics;
the bigger the book about his hero the more readily he bought it; he
purchased letters and tinsel and weapons that bore however remotely
upon the Man of Destiny, and he even secured in Geneva, though he never
brought home, an old coach in which Buonaparte might have ridden; he
crowded the quiet walls of Lady Grove with engravings and figures of
him, preferring, my aunt remarked, the more convex portraits with the
white vest and those statuettes with the hands behind the back which
threw forward the figure. The Durgans watched him through it all,
sardonically.

And he would stand after breakfast at times in the light of the window
at Lady Grove, a little apart, with two fingers of one hand stuck
between his waistcoat-buttons and his chin sunken, thinking,--the most
preposterous little fat man in the world. It made my aunt feel, she
said, "like an old Field Marshal--knocks me into a cocked hat, George!"

Perhaps this Napoleonic bias made him a little less frequent with his
cigars than he would otherwise have been, but of that I cannot be sure,
and it certainly caused my aunt a considerable amount of vexation after
he had read Napoleon and the Fair Sex, because for a time that roused
him to a sense of a side of life he had in his commercial preoccupations
very largely forgotten. Suggestion plays so great a part in this field.
My uncle took the next opportunity and had an "affair"!

It was not a very impassioned affair, and the exact particulars never of
course reached me. It is quite by chance I know anything of it at
all. One evening I was surprised to come upon my uncle in a mixture of
Bohemia and smart people at an At Home in the flat of Robbert, the R.A.
who painted my aunt, and he was standing a little apart in a recess,
talking or rather being talked to in undertones by a plump, blond
little woman in pale blue, a Helen Scrymgeour who wrote novels and was
organising a weekly magazine. I elbowed a large lady who was sa