ndoned
masses of the Crest Hill house.

That gave my mind a twist into a new channel. My uncle came uppermost
again. What a strange, melancholy emptiness of intention that stricken
enterprise seemed in the even evening sunlight, what vulgar magnificence
and crudity and utter absurdity! It was as idiotic as the pyramids. I
sat down on the stile, staring at it as though I had never seen that
forest of scaffold poles, that waste of walls and bricks and plaster and
shaped stones, that wilderness of broken soil and wheeling tracks and
dumps before. It struck me suddenly as the compactest image and sample
of all that passes for Progress, of all the advertisement-inflated
spending, the aimless building up and pulling down, the enterprise and
promise of my age. This was our fruit, this was what he had done, I and
my uncle, in the fashion of our time. We were its leaders and exponents,
we were the thing it most flourishingly produced. For this futility in
its end, for an epoch of such futility, the solemn scroll of history had
unfolded....

"Great God!" I cried, "but is this Life?"

For this the armies drilled, for this the Law was administered and the
prisons did their duty, for this the millions toiled and perished in
suffering, in order that a few of us should build palaces we never
finished, make billiard-rooms under ponds, run imbecile walls round
irrational estates, scorch about the world in motor-cars, devise
flying-machines, play golf and a dozen such foolish games of ball, crowd
into chattering dinner parties, gamble and make our lives one vast,
dismal spectacle of witless waste! So it struck me then, and for a time
I could think of no other interpretation. This was Life! It came to me
like a revelation, a revelation at once incredible and indisputable of
the abysmal folly of our being.

III

I was roused from such thoughts by the sound of footsteps behind me.

I turned half hopeful--so foolish is a lover's imagination, and stopped
amazed. It was my uncle. His face was white--white as I had seen it in
my dream.

"Hullo!" I said, and stared. "Why aren't you in London?"

"It's all up," he said....

"Adjudicated?"

"No!"

I stared at him for a moment, and then got off the stile.

We stood swaying and then came forward with a weak motion of his arms
like a man who cannot see distinctly, and caught at and leant upon the
stile. For a moment we were absolutely still. He made a clumsy gesture
towards the great