The painting! It worked up my arms; it got all over me. I stank of
it. It made me ill. It isn't living--it's minding. . . .

"Property's the curse of life. Property! Ugh! Look at this
country all cut up into silly little parallelograms, look at all
those villas we passed just now and those potato patches and that
tarred shanty and the hedge! Somebody's minding every bit of it
like a dog tied to a cart's tail. Patching it and bothering about
it. Bothering! Yapping at every passer-by. Look at that notice-
board! One rotten worried little beast wants to keep us other
rotten little beasts off HIS patch,--God knows why! Look at the
weeds in it. Look at the mended fence! . . . There's no property
worth having, Dick, but money. That's only good to spend. All
these things. Human souls buried under a cartload of blithering
rubbish. . . .

"I'm not a fool, Dick. I have qualities, imagination, a sort of go.
I ought to have made a better thing of life.

"I'm sure I could have done things. Only the old people pulled my
leg. They started me wrong. They never started me at all. I only
began to find out what life was like when I was nearly forty.

"If I'd gone to a university; if I'd had any sort of sound training,
if I hadn't slipped into the haphazard places that came easiest. . . .

"Nobody warned me. Nobody. It isn't a world we live in, Dick; it's
a cascade of accidents; it's a chaos exasperated by policemen! YOU
be warned in time, Dick. You stick to a plan. Don't wait for any
one to show you the way. Nobody will. There isn't a way till you