nd half eggs
subtly framed to puzzle and confuse my mind. I didn't see him for some
years until my father's death, and then he seemed rather smaller,
though still a fair size, yellow instead of red and much less radiantly
aggressive. This altered effect was due not so much to my own changed
perspectives, I fancy, as to the facts that he was suffering for
continuous cigar smoking, and being taken in hand by his adolescent
daughters who had just returned from school.

During my first visit there was a perpetual series of--the only word is
rows, between them and him. Up to the age of fifteen or thereabouts, he
had maintained his ascendancy over them by simple old-fashioned physical
chastisement. Then after an interlude of a year it had dawned upon them
that power had mysteriously departed from him. He had tried stopping
their pocket money, but they found their mother financially amenable;
besides which it was fundamental to my uncle's attitude that he should
give them money freely. Not to do so would seem like admitting a
difficulty in making it. So that after he had stopped their allowances
for the fourth time Sybil and Gertrude were prepared to face beggary
without a qualm. It had been his pride to give them the largest
allowance of any girls at the school, not even excepting the
granddaughter of Fladden the Borax King, and his soul recoiled from this
discipline as it had never recoiled from the ruder method of the
earlier phase. Both girls had developed to a high pitch in their mutual
recriminations a gift for damaging retort, and he found it an altogether
deadlier thing than the power of the raised voice that had always
cowed my aunt. Whenever he became heated with them, they frowned as if
involuntarily, drew in their breath sharply, said: "Daddy, you really
must not say--" and corrected his pronunciation. Then, at a great
advantage, they resumed the discussion....

My uncle's views about Cambridge, however, were perfectly clear and
definite. It was waste of time and money. It was all damned foolery.
Did they make a man a better business man? Not a bit of it. He gave
instances. It spoilt a man for business by giving him "false ideas."
Some men said that at college a man formed useful friendships. What use
were friendships to a business man? He might get to know lords, but, as
my uncle pointed out, a lord's requirements in his line of faience were
little greater than a common man's. If college introduced him to hotel