Manchurian Books

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 second-hand 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.


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