she could help
him she did. And even when he knew that there was nothing behind it,
that it was indeed little more than an imaginative inertness, he could
still admire and respect her steady dignity and her consistent
honourableness. Her practical capacity was for him a matter for
continual self-congratulation. He marked the bright order of her
household, her flowering borders, the prosperous high-born roses of her
garden with a wondering appreciation. He had never been able to keep
anything in order. He relied more and more upon her. He showed his
respect for her by a scrupulous attention to her dignity, and his
confidence by a franker and franker emotional neglect. Because she
expressed so little he succeeded in supposing she felt little, and since
nothing had come out of the brown depths of her eyes he saw fit at last
to suppose no plumb-line would ever find anything there. He pursued his
interests; he reached out to this and that; he travelled; she made it a
matter of conscience to let him go unhampered; she felt, she
thought--unrecorded; he did, and he expressed and re-expressed and
over-expressed, and started this and that with quick irrepressible
activity, and so there had accumulated about them the various items of
the life to whose more ostensible accidents Mr. Direck was now for an
indefinite period joined.

It was in the nature of Mr. Britling to incur things; it was in the
nature of Mrs. Britling to establish them. Mr. Britling had taken the
Dower House on impulse, and she had made it a delightful home. He had
discovered the disorderly delights of mixed Sunday hockey one week-end
at Pontings that had promised to be dull, and she had made it an
institution.... He had come to her with his orphan boy and a memory of a
passionate first loss that sometimes, and more particularly at first, he
seemed to have forgotten altogether, and at other times was only too
evidently lamenting with every fibre of his being. She had taken the
utmost care of the relics of her duskily pretty predecessor that she
found in unexpected abundance in Mr. Britling's possession, and she had
done her duty by her sometimes rather incomprehensible stepson. She
never allowed herself to examine the state of her heart towards this
youngster; it is possible that she did not perceive the necessity for
any such examination....

So she went through life, outwardly serene and dignified, one of a great
company of rather fastidious, rather unenterp