that reduced him to the proportions of a busy black beetle in a crack in
the floor.

And then my eye caught the advertisements on the south side of "Sorber's
Food," of "Cracknell's Ferric Wine," very bright and prosperous signs,
illuminated at night, and I realised how astonishingly they looked at
home there, how evidently part they were in the whole thing.

I saw a man come charging out of Palace Yard--the policeman touched his
helmet to him--with a hat and a bearing astonishingly like my uncle's.
After all,--didn't Cracknell himself sit in the House?

Tono-Bungay shouted at me from a hoarding near Adelphi Terrace; I saw
it afar off near Carfax Street; it cried out again upon me in Kensington
High Street, and burst into a perfect clamour; six or seven times I
saw it as I drew near my diggings. It certainly had an air of being
something more than a dream.

Yes, I thought it over--thoroughly enough.... Trade rules the world.
Wealth rather than trade! The thing was true, and true too was my
uncle's proposition that the quickest way to get wealth is to sell the
cheapest thing possible in the dearest bottle. He was frightfully right
after all. Pecunnia non olet,--a Roman emperor said that. Perhaps my
great heroes in Plutarch were no more than such men, fine now only
because they are distant; perhaps after all this Socialism to which I
had been drawn was only a foolish dream, only the more foolish because
all its promises were conditionally true. Morris and these others
played with it wittingly; it gave a zest, a touch of substance, to their
aesthetic pleasures. Never would there be good faith enough to bring
such things about. They knew it; every one, except a few young fools,