Tono-Bungay [antikvár]

BOOK THE FIRST THE DAYS BEFORE TONO-BUNGAY WAS INVENTED CHAPTER THE FIRST of bladesover house, and my motherj and the constitution of society I I Most people in this world seem to live 'in character'; they ha ve 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 say, no more (and no less) than 'character actors.' They ha ve a class, they have a place, they know what is becoming in them and what is due to them, and their proper size of tombstone telis at last how properly they have played the part. But there is alsó another kind of hfe that is not so much üving as a miscellaneous tasting of life. One gets hit by somé unusual transverse force, one is jerked out of one's stratum and lives crosswise for the rest of the time, and, as it were, in a succession of samples. That has been my lot, and that is what has set me at last writing something in the nature of a növel. I have got an unusual series of impressions that I want very urgently to teli. I have seen hfe at very different levels, and at all these levels I have seen it with a sort of intimacy and in good faith. I have been a native in many social countries. I have been the unwelcome guest of a working baker, my cousin, who has since died in the Chatham infirmary; I have eaten illegal snacks-the unjustifiable gifts of footmen-in pantries, and been despised for my want of style (and subsequently married and divorced) by the daughter of a gasworks clerk; and-to go to my other extreme-I was 7