I've read an average share of novels and made some starts before this
beginning, and I've found the restraints and rules of the art (as I made
them out) impossible for me. I like to write, I am keenly interested in
writing, but it is not my technique. I'm an engineer with a patent or
two and a set of ideas; most of whatever artist there is in me has been
given to turbine machines and boat building and the problem of flying,
and do what I will I fail to see how I can be other than a lax,
undisciplined story-teller. I must sprawl and flounder, comment and
theorise, if I am to get the thing out I have in mind. And it isn't
a constructed tale I have to tell, but unmanageable realities. My
love-story--and if only I can keep up the spirit of truth-telling all
through as strongly as I have now, you shall have it all--falls into
no sort of neat scheme of telling. It involves three separate feminine
persons. It's all mixed up with the other things....

But I've said enough, I hope, to excuse myself for the method or want
of method in what follows, and I think I had better tell without further
delay of my boyhood and my early impressions in the shadow of Bladesover
House.

III

There came a time when I realised that Bladesover House was not all it
seemed, but when I was a little boy I took the place with the entirest
faith as a complete authentic microcosm. I believed that the Bladesover
system was a little working-model--and not so very little either--of the
whole world.

Let me try and give you the effect of it.