were going down the brief grassy slope
between the road and the wall, straight at the wall, and still at a good
speed. The motor cyclist smacked against something and vanished from the
problem. The wall seemed to rush up at them and then--collapse. There
was a tremendous concussion. Mr. Direck gripped at his friend the
emergency brake, but had only time to touch it before his head hit
against the frame of the glass wind-screen, and a curtain fell upon
everything....

He opened his eyes upon a broken wall, a crumpled motor car, and an
undamaged motor cyclist in the aviator's cap and thin oilskin overalls
dear to motor cyclists. Mr. Direck stared and then, still stunned and
puzzled, tried to raise himself. He became aware of acute pain.

"Don't move for a bit," said the motor cyclist. "Your arm and side are
rather hurt, I think...."

Section 8

In the course of the next twelve hours Mr. Direck was to make a
discovery that was less common in the days before the war than it has
been since. He discovered that even pain and injury may be vividly
interesting and gratifying.

If any one had told him he was going to be stunned for five or six
minutes, cut about the brow and face and have a bone in his wrist put
out, and that as a consequence he would find himself pleased and
exhilarated, he would have treated the prophecy with ridicule; but here
he was lying stiffly on his back with his wrist bandaged to his side and
smiling into the darkness even more brightly than he had smiled at the
Essex landscape two days before. The fact is pain hurts or irritates,
but in itself it does not make a healthily constituted man miserable.
The expectation of pain, the certainty of injury may make one hopeless
enough, the reality rouses our resistance. Nobody wants a broken bone or
a delicate wrist, but very few people are very much depressed by getting
one. People can be much more depressed by smoking a hundred cigarettes
in three days or losing one per cent. of their capital.

And everybody had been most delightful to Mr. Direck.

He had had the monopoly of damage. Mr. Britling, holding on to the
steering wheel, had not even been thrown out. "Unless I'm internally
injured," he said, "I'm not hurt at all. My liver perhaps--bruised a
little...."

Gladys had been abandoned in the ditch, and they had been very kindly
brought home by a passing automobile. Cecily had been at the Dower
House at the moment of the rueful arrival. She had s