I do not know whether she is alive or dead.
It seems to me utterly grotesque that two people who have stood so close
to one another as she and I should be so separated, but so it is between
us.

Effie, too, I have parted from, though I still see her at times. Between
us there was never any intention of marriage nor intimacy of soul. She
had a sudden, fierce, hot-blooded passion for me and I for her, but
I was not her first lover nor her last. She was in another world from
Marion. She had a queer, delightful nature; I've no memory of
ever seeing her sullen or malicious. She was--indeed she was
magnificently--eupeptic. That, I think, was the central secret of her
agreeableness, and, moreover, that she was infinitely kind-hearted. I
helped her at last into an opening she coveted, and she amazed me by a
sudden display of business capacity. She has now a typewriting bureau
in Riffle's Inn, and she runs it with a brisk vigour and considerable
success, albeit a certain plumpness has overtaken her. And she still
loves her kind. She married a year or so ago a boy half her age--a
wretch of a poet, a wretched poet, and given to drugs, a thing with lank
fair hair always getting into his blue eyes, and limp legs. She did it,
she said, because he needed nursing....

But enough of this disaster of my marriage and of my early love affairs;
I have told all that is needed for my picture to explain how I came to
take up aeroplane experiments and engineering science; let me get back
to my essential story, to Tono-Bungay and my uncle's promotions and to
the vision of the world these things have given me.

BOOK THE THIRD

THE GREAT DAYS OF TONO-BUNGAY

CHAPTER THE FIRST

THE HARDINGHAM HOTEL, AND HOW WE BECAME BIG PEOPLE

I

But now that I resume the main line of my story it may be well to
describe the personal appearance of my uncle as I remember him during
those magnificent years that followed his passage from trade to finance.
The little man plumped up very considerably during the creation of the
Tono-Bungay property, but with the increasing excitements that followed
that first flotation came dyspepsia and a certain flabbiness and falling
away. His abdomen--if the reader will pardon my taking his features
in the order of their value--had at first a nice full roundness, but
afterwards it lost tone without, however, losing size. He always went as
though he was proud of it and would make as much of it as possible. To