helped her at last into an opening she coveted, and she amazed me by a
sudden display of business capacity. She has now a typewriting bureau
in Riffle's Inn, and she runs it with a brisk vigour and considerable
success, albeit a certain plumpness has overtaken her. And she still
loves her kind. She married a year or so ago a boy half her age--a
wretch of a poet, a wretched poet, and given to drugs, a thing with lank
fair hair always getting into his blue eyes, and limp legs. She did it,
she said, because he needed nursing....

But enough of this disaster of my marriage and of my early love affairs;
I have told all that is needed for my picture to explain how I came to
take up aeroplane experiments and engineering science; let me get back
to my essential story, to Tono-Bungay and my uncle's promotions and to
the vision of the world these things have given me.





BOOK THE THIRD

THE GREAT DAYS OF TONO-BUNGAY



CHAPTER THE FIRST

THE HARDINGHAM HOTEL, AND HOW WE BECAME BIG PEOPLE

I