And we stood high out of it
all, as high as if we looked godlike from another world, standing in
a room beautifully lit and furnished, skillfully warmed, filled with
costly things.

"There," thought I, "but for the grace of God, go George and Edward
Ponderevo."

But my uncle's thoughts ran in a different channel, and he made that
vision the test of a spirited but inconclusive harangue upon Tariff
Reform.

CHAPTER THE SECOND

OUR PROGRESS FROM CAMDEN TOWN TO CREST HILL

I

So far my history of my aunt and uncle has dealt chiefly with his
industrial and financial exploits. But side by side with that history of
inflation from the infinitesimal to the immense is another development,
the change year by year from the shabby impecuniosity of the Camden Town
lodging to the lavish munificence of the Crest Hill marble staircase and
my aunt's golden bed, the bed that was facsimiled from Fontainebleau.
And the odd thing is that as I come to this nearer part of my story I
find it much more difficult to tell than the clear little perspective
memories of the earlier days. Impressions crowd upon one another and
overlap one another; I was presently to fall in love again, to be seized
by a passion to which I still faintly respond, a passion that still
clouds my mind. I came and went between Ealing and my aunt and uncle,
and presently between Effie and clubland, and then between business
and a life of research that became far more continuous, infinitely more
consecutive and memorable than any of these other sets of experiences.
I didn't witness a regular social progress therefore; my aunt and
uncle went up in the world, so far as I was concerned, as if they were
displayed by an early cinematograph, with little jumps and flickers.

As I recall this side of our life, the figure of my round-eyes,
button-nosed, pink-and-white Aunt Susan tends always to the central
position. We drove the car and sustained the car, she sat in it with
a magnificent variety of headgear poised upon her delicate neck,
and always with that faint ghost of a lisp no misspelling can
render--commented on and illuminated the new aspects.

I've already sketched the little home behind the Wimblehurst chemist's
shop, the lodging near the Cobden statue, and the apartments in Gower
Street. Thence my aunt and uncle went into a flat in Redgauntlet
Mansions. There they lived when I married. It was a compact flat, with
very little for a woman to do in it In those day