w she connects and mingles with the furious quarrel
I had with my uncle that very evening. That came absurdly. Indirectly
Margaret was responsible. My mind was running on ideas she had revived
and questions she had set clamouring, and quite inadvertently in my
attempt to find solutions I talked so as to outrage his profoundest
feelings....

7

What a preposterous shindy that was!

I sat with him in the smoking-room, propounding what I considered to
be the most indisputable and non-contentious propositions
conceivable--until, to my infinite amazement, he exploded and called me
a "damned young puppy."

It was seismic.

"Tremendously interesting time," I said, "just in the beginning of
making a civilisation."

"Ah!" he said, with an averted face, and nodded, leaning forward over
his cigar.

I had not the remotest thought of annoying him.

"Monstrous muddle of things we have got," I said, "jumbled streets, ugly
population, ugly factories--"

"You'd do a sight better if you had to do with it," said my uncle,
regarding me askance.

"Not me. But a world that had a collective plan and knew where it meant
to be going would do a sight better, anyhow. We're all swimming in a
flood of ill-calculated chances--"

"You'll be making out I organised that business down there--by
chance--next," said my uncle, his voice thick with challenge.

I went on as though I was back in Trinity.

"There's a lot of chance in the making of all great businesses," I said.

My uncle remarked that that showed how much I knew about businesses.
If chance made businesses, why was it that he always succeeded and grew
while those fools Ackroyd and Sons always took second place? He showed
a disposition to tell the glorious history of how once Ackroyd's
overshadowed him, and how now he could buy up Ackroyd's three times
over. But I wanted to get out what was in my mind.

"Oh!" I said, "as between man and man and business and business, some
of course get the pull by this quality or that--but it's forces quite
outside the individual case that make the big part of any success
under modern conditions. YOU never invented pottery, nor any process in
pottery that matters a rap in your works; it wasn't YOUR foresight that
joined all England up with railways and made it possible to organise
production on an altogether different scale. You really at the utmost
can't take credit for much more than being the sort of man who happened
to fit what hap