knew it. As I crossed the corner of St. James's Park wrapped in thought,
I dodged back just in time to escape a prancing pair of greys. A stout,
common-looking woman, very magnificently dressed, regarded me from the
carriage with a scornful eye. "No doubt," thought I, "a pill-vendor's
wife...."

Running through all my thoughts, surging out like a refrain, was my
uncle's master-stroke, his admirable touch of praise: "Make it all
slick--and then make it go Woosh. I know you can! Oh! I KNOW you can!"

IV

Ewart as a moral influence was unsatisfactory. I had made up my mind to
put the whole thing before him, partly to see how he took it, and partly
to hear how it sounded when it was said. I asked him to come and eat
with me in an Italian place near Panton Street where one could get a
curious, interesting, glutting sort of dinner for eighteen-pence. He
came with a disconcerting black-eye that he wouldn't explain. "Not so
much a black-eye," he said, "as the aftermath of a purple patch....
What's your difficulty?"

"I'll tell you with the salad," I said.

But as a matter of fact I didn't tell him. I threw out that I was
doubtful whether I ought to go into trade, or stick to teaching in
view of my deepening socialist proclivities; and he, warming with the
unaccustomed generosity of a sixteen-penny Chianti, ran on from that
without any further inquiry as to my trouble.

His utterances roved wide and loose.