These things were only incidental in my department.

I had to polish them up for the artist and arrange the business of
printing and distribution, and after my uncle had had a violent and
needless quarrel with the advertising manager of the Daily Regulator
about the amount of display given to one of his happy thoughts, I also
took up the negotiations of advertisements for the press.

We discussed and worked out distribution together first in the
drawing-room floor in Gower Street with my aunt sometimes helping very
shrewdly, and then, with a steadily improving type of cigar and older
and older whisky, in his smuggery at their first house, the one in
Beckenham. Often we worked far into the night sometimes until dawn.

We really worked infernally hard, and, I recall, we worked with a very
decided enthusiasm, not simply on my uncle's part but mine, It was
a game, an absurd but absurdly interesting game, and the points were
scored in cases of bottles. People think a happy notion is enough to
make a man rich, that fortunes can be made without toil. It's a dream,
as every millionaire (except one or two lucky gamblers) can testify;
I doubt if J.D. Rockefeller in the early days of Standard Oil, worked
harder than we did. We worked far into the night--and we also worked all
day. We made a rule to be always dropping in at the factory unannounced
to keep things right--for at first we could afford no properly
responsible underlings--and we traveled London, pretending to be our own
representatives and making all sorts of special arrangements.

But none of this was my special work, and as soon as we could get other
men in, I dropped the traveling, though my uncle found it particularly