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"Shall I serve the tea now, Mem?" said the real housemaid, surveying our greeting coldly. "Not till Mr. Ponderevo comes, Meggie," said my aunt, and grimaced with extraordinary swiftness and virulence as the housemaid turned her back. "Meggie she calls herself," said my aunt as the door closed, and left me to infer a certain want of sympathy. "You're looking very jolly, aunt," said I.
Then again you get Grundy with a large greasy smile like an accident to a butter tub all over his face, being Liberal Minded Grundy in his Anti-Puritan moments, 'trying not to see Harm in it' Grundy the friend of innocent pleasure. He makes you sick with the Harm he's trying not to see in it... "And that's why everything's wrong, Ponderevo.
He kicked his legs about extravagantly, and I laughed again. "That's Grundy in one mood, Ponderevo. It isn't Mrs. Grundy. That's one of the lies we tell about women. They're too simple. Simple! Woman ARE simple! They take on just what men tell 'em." Ewart meditated for a space. "Just exactly as it's put to them," he said, and resumed the moods of Mr. Grundy.
And at last down we go, and then up we come washed up here." He swung his arms to the long slopes about us, tombs and headstones in long perspectives, in limitless rows. "We're young, Ponderevo, but sooner or later our whitened memories will wash up on one of these beaches, on some such beach as this. George Ponderevo, F.R.S., Sidney Ewart, R.I.P. Look at the rows of 'em!" He paused.
Ponderevo, being bankrupt, moves to London, and in the course of time George, now a student of science, follows him. New vistas of life open up in the midst of this vast, overgrown, "purposeless," "dingy" city. Nobody since Dickens has given us the impression of London in all its multitudinous, dismal-gay activities as Mr. Wells gives it us. But it is no longer the London of Dickens.
Ponderevo's wife the inimitable Aunt Susan called him "Teddy" and his nephew endorses the appropriateness of that diminutive; he affirms that there was a characteristic "teddiness" about Uncle Ponderevo. He failed as a retail chemist in Wimblehurst. He was not naturally dishonest, but he had windy ideas about finance, and he was careless in the matter of certain trust monies.
You won't smoke ... Well, it does me good to see you again, Ponderevo. Tell me what you're doing, and how you're getting on." He directed me in the service of his simple hospitality, and presently I came back to his bed and sat down and smiled at him there, smoking comfortably, with his hands under his head, surveying me. "How's Life's Morning, Ponderevo?
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