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Tono-Bungay

Most people in this world seem to live “in character”; they have a beginning, a middle and an end, and the three are congruous one with another and true to the rules of their type. You can speak of them as being of this sort of people or that. They are, as theatrical people sa...

Chapters

26. Chapter 26

We met in a ride in the upper plantations. It must have been early in January, for there was snow on the ground and on the branches of the trees. We walked to and fro for an hou...

29. Chapter 29

“More’s kept from me than anyone. The very servants won’t let me know. They try and stop the worst of the papers—Boom’s things—from coming upstairs.... I suppose they’ve got him...

31. Chapter 31

Last belated figure in that grouping round my uncle’s deathbed is my aunt. When it was beyond all hope that my uncle could live I threw aside whatever concealment remained to us...

25. Chapter 25

I wiped something that trickled from my face and was shocked to see my hand covered with blood. I looked at myself and saw what seemed to me an astonishing quantity of blood run...

28. Chapter 28

I can witness that the beach and mud for two miles or more either way was a lifeless beach—lifeless as I could have imagined no tropical mud could ever be, and all the dead bran...

27. Chapter 27

I’d never heard a woman before in all my life who could talk of love, who could lay bare and develop and touch with imagination all that mass of fine emotion every woman, it may...

7. Chapter 7

She had evidently been the wit and joy of a large circle of schoolfellows, and this style had become a second nature with her. It made her very delightful to me in that quiet pl...

5. Chapter 5

The nearer I drew to Bladesover, the more doubtful I grew of the duality of my reception, and the more I regretted that alternative. I suppose it was the dirty clumsiness of the...

3. Chapter 3

We had one inestimable privilege at that school, and that was spiritual neglect. We dealt with one another with the forcible simplicity of natural boys, we “cheeked,” and “punch...

30. Chapter 30

I must have dozed, and it was still dark when I realised with a start that we were nearly due south of, and a long way from, a regularly-flashing lighthouse, standing out before...

16. Chapter 16

My married existence became at last like a narrow deep groove in the broad expanse of interests in which I was living. I went about the world; I met a great number of varied per...

23. Chapter 23

“Great galleries and things—running out there and there—See? I been thinking of it, George! Looking out all this way—across the Weald. With its back to Lady Grove.”

11. Chapter 11

It was clear there would be nothing for me in the schools as I had once dared to hope; there seemed, indeed, scarcely anything in the world except an illpaid assistantship in so...

17. Chapter 17

She set herself presently to dispel the shadow that brooded over me with the same instinctive skill that some women will show with the trouble of a child. She made herself my gl...

22. Chapter 22

People say that my uncle lost his head at the crest of his fortunes, but if one may tell so much truth of a man one has in a manner loved, he never had very much head to lose. H...

24. Chapter 24

Garvell was patting the neck of his horse, which was inclined to fidget, and disregarding me. He nodded over his shoulder and followed. His movement seemed to release a train of...

9. Chapter 9

Even in the West End, in Mayfair and the square, about Pall Mall, Ewart was presently to remind me the face of the old aristocratic dignity was fairer than its substance; here w...

8. Chapter 8

She still “cheeked” my uncle, I was pleased to find. “What are you old Poking in for at _this_ time—_Gubbitt?_” she said when he appeared, and she still looked with a practised...

15. Chapter 15

“I seem to see—I seem to see—a sort of City of Women, Ponderevo. Yes.... A walled enclosure—good stone-mason’s work—a city wall, high as the walls of Rome, going about a garden....

4. Chapter 4

Then young Garvell, giving way before my slogging, stumbled and fell over a big flint, and I, still following the tradition of my class and school, promptly flung myself on him...

19. Chapter 19

“You’re only fit for the grocery,” said Gordon-Nasmyth scornfully, sitting down and helping himself to one of my uncle’s cigars. “I’m sorry I came. But, still, now I’m here.......

13. Chapter 13

And we also did admirable things with our next subsidiaries, “Tono-Bungay Lozenges,” and “Tono-Bungay Chocolate.” These we urged upon the public for their extraordinary nutritiv...

10. Chapter 10

The first of these came in the realisation that he quite seriously meant to do nothing in the world at all towards reforming the evils he laid bare in so easy and dexterous a ma...

6. Chapter 6

That is the last I shall tell of Bladesover. The dropscene falls on that, and it comes no more as an actual presence into this novel. I did indeed go back there once again, but...

21. Chapter 21

I had a moment of doubt whether perhaps she had not been discovered in possession of unsuspected forgeries. I don’t know. After that my eyes were quickened, and I began to see f...

14. Chapter 14

And the make-up of Marion’s mind in the matter was an equally irrational affair. Her training had been one, not simply of silences, but suppressions. An enormous force of sugges...

12. Chapter 12

I remember going home from our talk. I went down Farringdon Street to the Embankment because I thought to go home by Holborn and Oxford Street would be too crowded for thinking....

18. Chapter 18

We certainly made him no poorer. His was the first firm that was advertised by a circumstantial history; we even got to illustrated magazine articles telling of the quaint past...

20. Chapter 20

The impression that Beckenham company has left on my mind is one of a modest unreality; they were all maintaining a front of unspecified social pretension, and evading the displ...

1. Chapter 1

Most people in this world seem to live “in character”; they have a beginning, a middle and an end, and the three are congruous one with another and true to the rules of their ty...

2. Chapter 2

Of course their own ranks and places came by implication to these people, and it was with the ranks and places of the Olympians that the talk mainly concerned itself. There was...

32. Chapter 32

That should have been the last I saw of her, but, indeed, I was destined to see her once again. Two days after I was at Lady Grove, I forget altogether upon what errand, and as...