Tono-Bungay. H. G. Wells

heard on earth — unless my uncle indulged in monologues in his chamber — a highly probable thing. Its utterance certainly did not seem to me at the time to mark any sort of epoch, and had I been told this word was the Open Sesame to whatever pride and pleasure the grimy front of London hid from us that evening, I should have laughed aloud.

      “Coming now to business,” I said after a pause, and with a chill sense of effort; and I opened the question of his trust.

      My uncle sighed, and leant back in his chair. “I wish I could make all this business as clear to you as it is to me,” he said. “However — Go on! Say what you have to say.”

      VII

      After I left my uncle that evening I gave way to a feeling of profound depression. My uncle and aunt seemed to me to be leading — I have already used the word too often, but I must use it again — Dingy lives. They seemed to be adrift in a limitless crowd of dingy people, wearing shabby clothes, living uncomfortably in shabby secondhand houses, going to and fro on pavements that had always a thin veneer of greasy, slippery mud, under grey skies that showed no gleam of hope of anything for them but dinginess until they died. It seemed absolutely clear to me that my mother’s little savings had been swallowed up and that my own prospect was all too certainly to drop into and be swallowed up myself sooner or later by this dingy London ocean. The London that was to be an adventurous escape from the slumber of Wimblehurst, had vanished from my dreams. I saw my uncle pointing to the houses in Park Lane and showing a frayed shirt-cuff as he did so. I heard my aunt: “I’m to ride in my carriage then. So he old says.”