ry high rate of energy waste.
Moods of apathy and indolence are natural to me. (Damn that omnibus! All
over the road!)"

"We don't deny the imperfection--" began the doctor.

"One has to fit oneself to one's circumstances," said Sir Richmond,
opening up another line of thought.

"We don't deny the imperfection" the doctor stuck to it. "These new
methods of treatment are based on the idea of imperfection. We begin
with that. I began with that last Tuesday...."

Sir Richmond, too, was sticking to his argument. "A man, and for
that matter the world he lives in, is a tangle of accumulations. Your
psychoanalyst starts, it seems to me, with a notion of stripping down
to something fundamental. The ape before was a tangle of accumulations,
just as we are. So it was with his forebears. So it has always been. All
life is an endless tangle of accumulations."

"Recognize it," said the doctor.

"And then?" said Sir Richmond, controversially.

"Recognize in particular your own tangle."

"Is my particular tangle very different from the general tangle? (Oh!
Damn this feeble little engine!) I am a creature of undecided will,
urged on by my tangled heredity to do a score of entirely incompatible
things. Mankind, all life, is that."

"But our concern is the particular score of incompatible things you are
urged to do. We examine and weigh--we weigh--"

The doctor was still saying these words when a violent and ultimately
disastrous struggle began between Sir Richmond and the little Charmeuse
car. The doctor stopped in mid-sentence.

It was near Taplow station that the mutual exasperation of man and
machine was brought to a crisis by the clumsy emergence of a laundry
cart from a side road. Sir Richmond was obliged to pull up smartly and
stopped his engine. It refused an immediate obedience to the electric
starter. Then it picked up, raced noisily, disengaged great volumes of
bluish smoke, and displayed an unaccountable indisposition to run on any
gear but the lowest. Sir Richmond thought aloud, unpleasing thoughts.
He addressed the little car as a person; he referred to ancient disputes
and temperamental incompatibilities. His anger betrayed him a coarse,
ill-bred man. The little car quickened under his reproaches. There were
some moments of hope, dashed by the necessity of going dead slow behind
an interloping van. Sir Richmond did not notice the outstretched arm
of the driver of the van, and stalled his engine for a second ti