I do not remember much of my journey to Wimblehurst with my mother
except the image of her as sitting bolt upright, as rather disdaining
the third-class carriage in which we traveled, and how she looked away
from me out of the window when she spoke of my uncle. "I have not seen
your uncle," she said, "since he was a boy...." She added grudgingly,
"Then he was supposed to be clever."

She took little interest in such qualities as cleverness.

"He married about three years ago, and set up for himself in
Wimblehurst.... So I suppose she had some money."

She mused on scenes she had long dismissed from her mind. "Teddy," she
said at last in the tone of one who has been feeling in the dark
and finds. "He was called Teddy... about your age.... Now he must be
twenty-six or seven."

I thought of my uncle as Teddy directly I saw him; there was something
in his personal appearance that in the light of that memory phrased
itself at once as Teddiness--a certain Teddidity. To describe it in
and other terms is more difficult. It is nimbleness without grace, and
alertness without intelligence. He whisked out of his shop upon the
pavement, a short figure in grey and wearing grey carpet slippers; one
had a sense of a young fattish face behind gilt glasses, wiry hair that
stuck up and forward over the forehead, an irregular nose that had its
aquiline moments, and that the body betrayed an equatorial laxity, an
incipient "bow window" as the image goes. He jerked out of the shop,
came to a stand on the pavement outside, regarded something in the
window with infinite appreciation, stroked his chin, and, as abruptly,