"So few people see it," I said; "more's the pity!"

She sighed and said again very softly, "Yes."...

There was another long pause. I looked at her and she was thinking
dreamily. The drowning sensation returned, the fear and enfeeblement. I
perceived by a sort of inspiration that her tea-cup was empty.

"Let me take your cup," I said abruptly, and, that secured, made for the
table by the summer-house. I had no intention then of deserting my
aunt. But close at hand the big French window of the drawing-room
yawned inviting and suggestive. I can feel all that temptation now, and
particularly the provocation of my collar. In an instant I was lost. I
would--Just for a moment!

I dashed in, put down the cup on the keys of the grand piano and fled
upstairs, softly, swiftly, three steps at a time, to the sanctuary of my
uncle's study, his snuggery. I arrived there breathless, convinced
there was no return for me. I was very glad and ashamed of myself, and
desperate. By means of a penknife I contrived to break open his cabinet
of cigars, drew a chair to the window, took off my coat, collar and tie,
and remained smoking guiltily and rebelliously, and peeping through the
blind at the assembly on the lawn until it was altogether gone....

The clergymen, I thought, were wonderful.

III

A few such pictures of those early days at Beckenham stand out, and then
I find myself among the Chiselhurst memories. The Chiselhurst mansion
had "grounds" rather than a mere garden, and there was a gardener's
cottage and a little lodge at the gate. The ascendant movement was
always far more in evidence there than at Beckenham. The velocity was
increasing.

One night picks itself out as typical, as, in its way, marking an epoch.
I was there, I think, about some advertisement stuff, on some sort of
business anyhow, and my uncle and aunt had come back in a fly from a
dinner at the Runcorns. (Even there he was nibbling at Runcorn with the
idea of our great Amalgamation budding in his mind.) I got down there, I
suppose, about eleven. I found the two of them sitting in the study, my
aunt on a chair-arm with a whimsical pensiveness on her face, regarding
my uncle, and he, much extended and very rotund, in the low arm-chair
drawn up to the fender.

"Look here, George," said my uncle, after my first greetings. "I just
been saying: We aren't Oh Fay!"

"Eh?"

"Not Oh Fay! Socially!"

"Old FLY, he means, George--French!"

"Oh! Didn't think o