hey
say--she god-mothered three Susans during her rule, the coachman's, the
gardener's, and the Up Hill gamekeeper's. She got together a library of
old household books that were in the vein of the place. She revived the
still-room, and became a great artist in jellies and elder and cowslip
wine.

X

And while I neglected the development of my uncle's finances--and
my own, in my scientific work and my absorbing conflict with the
difficulties of flying,--his schemes grew more and more expansive and
hazardous, and his spending wilder and laxer. I believe that a haunting
sense of the intensifying unsoundness of his position accounts largely
for his increasing irritability and his increasing secretiveness with my
aunt and myself during these crowning years. He dreaded, I think, having
to explain, he feared our jests might pierce unwittingly to the truth.
Even in the privacy of his mind he would not face the truth. He was
accumulating unrealisable securities in his safes until they hung a
potential avalanche over the economic world. But his buying became a
fever, and his restless desire to keep it up with himself that he was
making a triumphant progress to limitless wealth gnawed deeper and
deeper. A curious feature of this time with him was his buying over and
over again of similar things. His ideas seemed to run in series. Within
a twelve-month he bought five new motor-cars, each more swift and
powerful than its predecessor, and only the repeated prompt resignation
of his chief chauffeur at each moment of danger, prevented his driving
them himself. He used them more and more. He developed a passion for
locomotion for its own sake.

Then he began to chafe at Lady Grove, fretted by a chance jest he had
overheard at a dinner. "This house, George," he said. "It's a misfit.
There's no elbow-room in it; it's choked with old memories. And I can't
stand all these damned Durgans!

"That chap in the corner, George. No! the other corner! The man in a
cherry-coloured coat. He watched you! He'd look silly if I stuck a poker
through his Gizzard!"

"He'd look," I reflected, "much as he does now. As though he was
amused."

He replaced his glasses, which had fallen at his emotion, and glared at
his antagonists. "What are they? What are they all, the lot of 'em?
Dead as Mutton! They just stuck in the mud. They didn't even rise to the
Reformation. The old out-of-date Reformation! Move with the times!--they
moved against the times.