you." But he seemed shaken by the fact that some Burslem rival was

launching out with the new invention. "He spoils his girls," he

remarked. "He's a fool," and became thoughtful.

Afterwards he asked me to come to him into his study; it was a room

with a writing-desk and full of pieces of earthenware and suchlike

litter, and we had our great row about Cambridge.

"Have you thought things over, Dick?" he said.

"I think I'll go to Trinity, Uncle," I said firmly. "I want to go

to Trinity. It is a great college."

He was manifestly chagrined. "You're a fool," he said.

I made no answer.

"You're a damned fool," he said. "But I suppose you've got to do

it. You could have come here-That don't matter, though, now…

You'll have your time and spend your money, and be a poor half-

starved clergyman, mucking about with the women all the day and

afraid to have one of your own ever, or you'll be a schoolmaster or

some such fool for the rest of your life. Or some newspaper chap.

That's what you'll get from Cambridge. I'm half a mind not to let

you. Eh? More than half a mind…"

"You've got to do the thing you can," he said, after a pause, "and

likely it's what you're fitted for."

4

I paid several short visits to Staffordshire during my Cambridge

days, and always these relations of mine produced the same effect of

hardness. My uncle's thoughts had neither atmosphere nor mystery.

He lived in a different universe from the dreams of scientific

construction that filled my mind. He could as easily have

understood Chinese poetry. His motives were made up of intense

rivalries with other men of his class and kind, a few vindictive

hates springing from real and fancied slights, a habit of

acquisition that had become a second nature, a keen love both of

efficiency and display in his own affairs. He seemed to me to have

no sense of the state, no sense and much less any love of beauty, no

charity and no sort of religious feeling whatever. He had strong

bodily appetites, he ate and drank freely, smoked a great deal, and

occasionally was carried off by his passions for a "bit of a spree"

to Birmingham or Liverpool or Manchester. The indulgences of these

occasions were usually followed by a period of reaction, when he was

urgent for the suppression of nudity in the local Art Gallery and a

harsh and forcible elevation of the superficial morals of the

valley. And he spoke of the ladies who ministered to the delights

of his jolly-dog period, when he spoke of them at all, by the

unprintable feminine equivalent. My aunt he treated with a kindly

contempt and considerable financial generosity, but his daughters

tore his heart; he was so proud of them, so glad to find them money

to spend, so resolved to own them, so instinctively jealous of every

man who came near them.

My uncle has been the clue to a great number of men for me. He was

an illuminating extreme. I have learnt what not to expect from them

through him, and to comprehend resentments and dangerous sudden

antagonisms I should have found incomprehensible in their more

complex forms, if I had not first seen them in him in their feral

state.

With his soft felt hat at the back of his head, his rather heavy,

rather mottled face, his rationally thick boots and slouching tweed-

clad form, a little round-shouldered and very obstinate looking, he

strolls through all my speculations sucking his teeth audibly, and

occasionally throwing out a shrewd aphorism, the intractable

unavoidable ore of the new civilisation.

Essentially he was simple. Generally speaking, he hated and

despised in equal measure whatever seemed to suggest that he

personally was not the most perfect human being conceivable. He

hated all education after fifteen because he had had no education

after fifteen, he hated all people who did not have high tea until

he himself under duress gave up high tea, he hated every game except

football, which he had played and could judge, he hated all people

who spoke foreign languages because he knew no language but

Staffordshire, he hated all foreigners because he was English, and

all foreign ways because they were not his ways. Also he hated

particularly, and in this order, Londoner's, Yorkshiremen, Scotch,

Welch and Irish, because they were not "reet Staffordshire," and he

hated all other Staffordshire men as insufficiently "reet." He

wanted to have all his own women inviolate, and to fancy he had a

call upon every other woman in the world. He wanted to have the

best cigars and the best brandy in the world to consume or give away

magnificently, and every one else to have inferior ones. (His

billiard table was an extra large size, specially made and very