having all the quinine in the world, and some millionaire's pampered
wife gone ill with malaria, eh? That's a squeeze, George, eh? Eh?
Millionaire on his motor car outside, offering you any price you liked.
That 'ud wake up Wimblehurst.... Lord! You haven't an Idea down here.
Not an idea. Zzzz."

He passed into a rapt dream, from which escaped such fragments as:
"Fifty per cent. advance sir; security--to-morrow. Zzzz."

The idea of cornering a drug struck upon my mind then as a sort of
irresponsible monkey trick that no one would ever be permitted to do in
reality. It was the sort of nonsense one would talk to make Ewart laugh
and set him going on to still odder possibilities. I thought it was part
of my uncle's way of talking. But I've learnt differently since. The
whole trend of modern money-making is to foresee something that will
presently be needed and put it out of reach, and then to haggle yourself
wealthy. You buy up land upon which people will presently want to build
houses, you secure rights that will bar vitally important developments,
and so on, and so on. Of course the naive intelligence of a boy does not
grasp the subtler developments of human inadequacy. He begins life with
a disposition to believe in the wisdom of grown-up people, he does not
realise how casual and disingenuous has been the development of law and
custom, and he thinks that somewhere in the state there is a power
as irresistible as a head master's to check mischievous and foolish
enterprises of every sort. I will confess that when my uncle talked of
cornering quinine, I had a clear impression that any one who contrived
to do that would pretty certainly go to jail. Now I know that any one
who could really bring it off would be much more likely to go to the
House of Lords!

My uncle ranged over the gilt labels of his bottles and drawers for a
while, dreaming of corners in this and that. But at last he reverted to
Wimblehurst again.

"You got to be in London when these things are in hand. Down here--!

"Jee-rusalem!" he cried. "Why did I plant myself here? Everything's
done. The game's over. Here's Lord Eastry, and he's got everything,
except what his lawyers get, and before you get any more change this way
you'll have to dynamite him--and them. HE doesn't want anything more
to happen. Why should he? Any chance 'ud be a loss to him. He wants
everything to burble along and burble along and go on as it's going
for the next ten thousand ye