bbons!"

His eye searched my face. "We've grown so accustomed to look up to Lady
Grove," he said, and smiled in search of sympathy. "It shifts our centre
of gravity."

"Things will readjust themselves," I lied.

He snatched at the phrase. "Of course," he said.

"They'll readjust themselves--settle down again. Must. In the old way.
It's bound to come right again--a comforting thought. Yes. After all,
Lady Grove itself had to be built once upon a time--was--to begin
with--artificial."

His eye returned to my aeroplane. He sought to dismiss his graver
preoccupations. "I should think twice," he remarked, "before I trusted
myself to that concern.... But I suppose one grows accustomed to the
motion."

He bade me good morning and went his way, bowed and thoughtful....

He had kept the truth from his mind a long time, but that morning it had
forced its way to him with an aspect that brooked no denial that this
time it was not just changes that were coming in his world, but that all
his world lay open and defenceless, conquered and surrendered, doomed so
far as he could see, root and branch, scale and form alike, to change.

CHAPTER THE THIRD

SOARING

I

For nearly all the time that my uncle was incubating and hatching
Crest Hill I was busy in a little transverse valley between that
great beginning and Lady Grove with more and more costly and ambitious
experiments in aerial navigation. This work was indeed the main
substance of my life through all the great time of the Tono-Bungay
symphony.

I have told already how I came to devote myself to this system of
inquiries, how in a sort of disgust with the common adventure of life
I took up the dropped ends of my college studies, taking them up again
with a man's resolution instead of a boy's ambition. From the first
I did well at this work. It--was, I think, largely a case of special
aptitude, of a peculiar irrelevant vein of faculty running through my
mind. It is one of those things men seem to have by chance, that has
little or nothing to do with their general merit, and which it is
ridiculous to be either conceited or modest about. I did get through
a very big mass of work in those years, working for a time with a
concentrated fierceness that left little of such energy or capacity as
I possess unused. I worked out a series of problems connected with the
stability of bodies pitching in the air and the internal movements of
the wind, and I also revolutionised one