VII

After I left my uncle that evening I gave way to a feeling of profound
depression. My uncle and aunt seemed to me to be leading--I have already
used the word too often, but I must use it again--DINGY lives. They
seemed to be adrift in a limitless crowd of dingy people, wearing shabby
clothes, living uncomfortably in shabby second-hand houses, going to and
fro on pavements that had always a thin veneer of greasy, slippery mud,
under grey skies that showed no gleam of hope of anything for them but
dinginess until they died. It seemed absolutely clear to me that my
mother's little savings had been swallowed up and that my own prospect
was all too certainly to drop into and be swallowed up myself sooner
or later by this dingy London ocean. The London that was to be an
adventurous escape from the slumber of Wimblehurst, had vanished from my
dreams. I saw my uncle pointing to the houses in Park Lane and showing
a frayed shirt-cuff as he did so. I heard my aunt: "I'm to ride in my
carriage then. So he old says."

My feelings towards my uncle were extraordinarily mixed. I was intensely
sorry not only for my aunt Susan but for him--for it seemed indisputable
that as they were living then so they must go on--and at the same time I
was angry with the garrulous vanity and illness that had elipped all
my chance of independent study, and imprisoned her in those grey
apartments. When I got back to Wimblehurst I allowed myself to write
him a boyishly sarcastic and sincerely bitter letter. He never replied.
Then, believing it to be the only way of escape for me, I set myself far
more grimly and resolutely to my studies than I had ever done before.
After a time I wrote to him in more moderate terms, and he answered
me evasively. And then I tried to dismiss him from my mind and went on
working.