as demanded of them. The whole of this
modern mercantile investing civilisation is indeed such stuff as dreams
are made of. A mass of people swelters and toils, great railway systems
grow, cities arise to the skies and spread wide and far, mines are
opened, factories hum, foundries roar, ships plough the seas, countries
are settled; about this busy striving world the rich owners go,
controlling all, enjoying all, confident and creating the confidence
that draws us all together into a reluctant, nearly unconscious
brotherhood. I wonder and plan my engines. The flags flutter, the crowds
cheer, the legislatures meet. Yet it seems to me indeed at times that
all this present commercial civilisation is no more than my poor uncle's
career writ large, a swelling, thinning bubble of assurances; that
its arithmetic is just as unsound, its dividends as ill-advised, its
ultimate aim as vague and forgotten; that it all drifts on perhaps to
some tremendous parallel to his individual disaster...

Well, so it was we Boomed, and for four years and a half we lived a life
of mingled substance and moonshine. Until our particular unsoundness
overtook us we went about in the most magnificent of motor-cars upon
tangible high roads, made ourselves conspicuous and stately in splendid
houses, ate sumptuously and had a perpetual stream of notes and money
trickling into our pockets; hundreds of thousands of men and women
respected us, saluted us and gave us toil and honour; I asked, and my
worksheets rose, my aeroplanes swooped out of nothingness to scare the
downland pe-wits; my uncle waved his hand and Lady Grove and all its
associations of chivalry and ancient peace were his; waved again, and
architects were busy planning the great palace he never finished at
Crest Hill and an army of folkmen gathered to do his bidding, blue
marble came from Canada, and timber from New Zealand; and beneath it
all, you know, there was nothing but fictitious values as evanescent as
rainbow gold.

IV

I pass the Hardingham ever and again and glance aside through the great
archway at the fountain and the ferns, and think of those receding days
when I was so near the centre of our eddy of greed and enterprise. I see
again my uncle's face, white and intent, and hear him discourse, hear
him make consciously Napoleonic decisions, "grip" his nettles, put
his "finger on the spot," "bluff," say "snap." He became particularly
addicted to the last idiom. Towards the end