He was always offering me winners; no doubt in a
spirit of anticipatory exchange for some really good thing in our more
scientific and certain method of getting something for nothing....
In spite of my preoccupation with my experiments, work, I did, I find
now that I come to ransack my impressions, see a great deal of the great
world during those eventful years; I had a near view of the machinery
by which an astounding Empire is run, rubbed shoulders and exchanged
experiences with bishops and statesmen, political women and women who
were not political, physicians and soldiers, artists and authors, the
directors of great journals, philanthropists and all sorts of eminent,
significant people. I saw the statesmen without their orders and the
bishops with but a little purple silk left over from their canonicals,
inhaling, not incensen but cigar smoke. I could look at them all the
better because, for the most part, they were not looking at me but at my
uncle, and calculating consciously or unconsciously how they might use
him and assimilate him to their system, the most unpremeditated, subtle,
successful and aimless plutocracy that ever encumbered the destinies of
mankind.
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