I arrived there breathless, convinced
there was no return for me. I was very glad and ashamed of myself, and
desperate. By means of a penknife I contrived to break open his cabinet
of cigars, drew a chair to the window, took off my coat, collar and tie,
and remained smoking guiltily and rebelliously, and peeping through the
blind at the assembly on the lawn until it was altogether gone....
The clergymen, I thought, were wonderful.
III
A few such pictures of those early days at Beckenham stand out, and then
I find myself among the Chiselhurst memories. The Chiselhurst mansion
had "grounds" rather than a mere garden, and there was a gardener's
cottage and a little lodge at the gate. The ascendant movement was
always far more in evidence there than at Beckenham. The velocity was
increasing.
One night picks itself out as typical, as, in its way, marking an epoch.
I was there, I think, about some advertisement stuff, on some sort of
business anyhow, and my uncle and aunt had come back in a fly from a
dinner at the Runcorns. (Even there he was nibbling at Runcorn with the
idea of our great Amalgamation budding in his mind.
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