"Just a Family of Failure,--they never even tried!

"They're jes', George, exactly what I'm not. Exactly. It isn't
suitable.... All this living in the Past.

"And I want a bigger place too, George. I want air and sunlight and
room to move about and more service. A house where you can get a Move
on things! Zzzz. Why! it's like a discord--it jars--even to have the
telephone.... There's nothing, nothing except the terrace, that's worth
a Rap. It's all dark and old and dried up and full of old-fashioned
things--musty old idees--fitter for a silver-fish than a modern man....
I don't know how I got here."

He broke out into a new grievance. "That damned vicar," he complained,
"thinks I ought to think myself lucky to get this place! Every time I
meet him I can see him think it.... One of these days, George I'll show
him what a Mod'un house is like!"

And he did.

I remember the day when he declared, as Americans say, for Crest
Hill. He had come up to see my new gas plant, for I was then only just
beginning to experiment with auxiliary collapsible balloons, and all
the time the shine of his glasses was wandering away to the open down
beyond. "Let's go back to Lady Grove over the hill," he said. "Something
I want to show you. Something fine!"

It was an empty sunlit place that summer evening, sky and earth
warm with sundown, and a pe-wit or so just accentuating the pleasant
stillness that ends a long clear day. A beautiful peace, it was, to
wreck for ever. And there was my uncle, the modern man of power, in his
grey top-hat and his grey suit and his black-ribboned glasses, short,
thin-legged, large-stomached, pointing and gesticulating, threatening
this calm.

He began with a wave of his arm. "That's the place, George," he said.
"See?"

"Eh!" I cried--for I had been thinking of remote things.

"I got it."

"Got what?"

"For a house!--a Twentieth Century house! That's the place for it!"

One of his characteristic phrases was begotten in him.

"Four-square to the winds of heaven, George!" he said. "Eh? Four-square
to the winds of heaven!"

"You'll get the winds up here," I said.

"A mammoth house it ought to be, George--to suit these hills."

"Quite," I said.

"Great galleries and things--running out there and there--See? I been
thinking of it, George! Looking out all this way--across the Weald. With
its back to Lady Grove."

"And the morning sun in its eye."

"Like an eagle, George,--like an eagle!"