and all that! Wo-oo-oo-osh! I know my
limitations. There's things I can do, and" (he spoke in a whisper, as
though this was the first hint of his life's secret) "there's things I
can't. Well, I can create this business, but I can't make it go. I'm too
voluminous--I'm a boiler-over, not a simmering stick-at-it. You keep on
HOTTING UP AND HOTTING UP. Papin's digester. That's you, steady and
long and piling up,--then, wo-oo-oo-oo-osh. Come in and stiffen these
niggers. Teach them that wo-oo-oo-oo-osh. There you are! That's what I'm
after. You! Nobody else believes you're more than a boy. Come right in
with me and be a man. Eh, George? Think of the fun of it--a thing on
the go--a Real Live Thing! Wooshing it up! Making it buzz and spin!
Whoo-oo-oo."--He made alluring expanding circles in the air with his
hand. "Eh?"

His proposal, sinking to confidential undertones again, took more
definite shape. I was to give all my time and energy to developing and
organising. "You shan't write a single advertisement, or give a single
assurance" he declared. "I can do all that." And the telegram was no
flourish; I was to have three hundred a year. Three hundred a year.
("That's nothing," said my uncle, "the thing to freeze on to, when the
time comes, is your tenth of the vendor's share.")

Three hundred a year certain, anyhow! It was an enormous income to me.
For a moment I was altogether staggered. Could there be that much money
in the whole concern? I looked about me at the sumptuous furniture of
Schafer's Hotel. No doubt there were many such incomes.

My head was spinning with unwonted Benedictine and Burgundy.

"Let me go back and look at the game again," I said. "Let me see
upstairs and round about."

I did.

"What do you think of it all?" my uncle asked at last.

"Well, for one thing," I said, "why don't you have those girls working
in a decently ventilated room? Apart from any other consideration,
they'd work twice as briskly. And they ought to cover the corks before
labelling round the bottle."

"Why?" said my uncle.

"Because--they sometimes make a mucker of the cork job, and then the
label's wasted."

"Come and change it, George," said my uncle, with sudden fervour "Come
here and make a machine of it. You can. Make it all slick, and then make
it woosh. I know you can. Oh! I know you can."

II

I seem to remember very quick changes of mind after that lunch. The
muzzy exaltation of the unaccustomed stimulants gave