was responsible. My mind was running on ideas she had revived and questions she had set clamouring, and quite inadvertently in my attempt to find solutions I talked so as to outrage his profoundest feelings....
7
What a preposterous shindy that was!
I sat with him in the smoking-room, propounding what I considered to be the most indisputable and non-contentious propositions conceivable—until, to my infinite amazement, he exploded and called me a “damned young puppy.”
It was seismic.
“Tremendously interesting time,” I said, “just in the beginning of making a civilisation.”
“Ah!” he said, with an averted face, and nodded, leaning forward over his cigar.
I had not the remotest thought of annoying him.
“Monstrous muddle of things we have got,” I said, “jumbled streets, ugly population, ugly factories—”
“You'd do a sight better if you had to do with it,” said my uncle, regarding me askance.
“Not me. But a world that