indeed, than any adult seems to be. I was capable then of efforts--of
nobilities.... They are beyond me now. I don't see why, at forty, I
shouldn't confess I respect my own youth. I had dropped being a boy
quite abruptly. I thought I was presently to go out into a larger and
quite important world and do significant things there. I thought I
was destined to do something definite to a world that had a definite
purpose. I did not understand then, as I do now, that life was to
consist largely in the world's doing things to me. Young people never
do seem to understand that aspect of things. And, as I say, among my
educational influences my uncle, all unsuspected, played a leading part,
and perhaps among other things gave my discontent with Wimblehurst, my
desire to get away from that clean and picturesque emptiness, a form and
expression that helped to emphasise it. In a way that definition made me
patient. "Presently I shall get to London," I said, echoing him.

I remember him now as talking, always talking, in those days. He talked
to me of theology, he talked of politics, of the wonders of science
and the marvels of art, of the passions and the affections, of
the immortality of the soul and the peculiar actions of drugs; but
predominantly and constantly he talked of getting on, of enterprises,
of inventions and great fortunes, of Rothschilds, silver kings,
Vanderbilts, Goulds, flotations, realisations and the marvelous ways
of Chance with men--in all localities, that is to say, that are not
absolutely sunken to the level of Cold Mutton Fat.

When I think of those early talks, I figure him always in one of three
positions. Either we were in the dispensing lair behind a high barrier,
he pounding up things in a mortar perhaps, and I rolling pill-stuff into
long rolls and cutting it up with a sort of broad, fluted knife, or
he stood looking out of the shop door against the case of sponges and