I didn't succumb without a struggle to my uncle's allurements. Indeed, I
held out for a week while I contemplated life and my prospects. It was a
crowded and muddled contemplation. It invaded even my sleep.

My interview with the Registrar, my talk with my uncle, my abrupt
discovery of the hopeless futility of my passion for Marion, had
combined to bring me to sense of crisis. What was I going to do with
life?

I remember certain phases of my indecisions very well.

I remember going home from our talk. I went down Farringdon Street to
the Embankment because I thought to go home by Holborn and Oxford Street
would be too crowded for thinking.... That piece of Embankment
from Blackfriars to Westminster still reminds me of that momentous
hesitation.

You know, from first to last, I saw the business with my eyes open, I
saw its ethical and moral values quite clearly. Never for a moment do
I remember myself faltering from my persuasion that the sale of
Tono-Bungay was a thoroughly dishonest proceeding. The stuff was, I
perceived, a mischievous trash, slightly stimulating, aromatic and
attractive, likely to become a bad habit and train people in the
habitual use of stronger tonics and insidiously dangerous to people with
defective kidneys. It would cost about sevenpence the large bottle to
make, including bottling, and we were to sell it at half a crown plus
the cost of the patent medicine stamp. A thing that I will confess
deterred me from the outset far more than the sense of dishonesty in
this affair, was the supreme silliness of the whole concern. I still
clung to the idea that the world of men was or should be a sane and just