It will put us on a
footing."...
Her eyes asked mutely and asked in vain that I would cease to boast of
the very qualities she admired in me.
In the night I could not sleep for thinking of that talk and the vulgar
things I had said in it. I could not understand the drift my mind had
taken. I was acutely disgusted. And my unwonted doubts about myself
spread from a merely personal discontent to our financial position.
It was all very well to talk as I had done of wealth and power and
peerages, but what did I know nowadays of my uncle's position? Suppose
in the midst of such boasting and confidence there came some turn I did
not suspect, some rottenness he had concealed from me? I resolved I had
been playing with aeronautics long enough; that next morning I would go
to him and have things clear between us.
I caught an early train and went up to the Hardingham.
I went up to the Hardingham through a dense London fog to see how things
really stood. Before I had talked to my uncle for ten minutes I felt
like a man who has just awakened in a bleak, inhospitable room out of a
grandiose dream.
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