er. Besides,
then, what would he do with his dull days, his afternoons, his need for
a properly demonstrated affection?

So Mr. Britling trod the path of his eighth digression, rather
overworked in the matter of flowers and the selection of small
jewellery, stalked by the invisible and indefatigable Oliver, haunted
into an unwilling industry of attentions--attentions on the model of the
professional lover of the French novels--by the memory and expectation
of tearful scenes. "Then you don't love me! And it's all spoilt. I've
risked talk and my reputation.... I was a fool ever to dream of making
love beautifully...."

Exactly like running your car into a soft wet ditch when you cannot get
out and you cannot get on. And your work and your interests waiting and
waiting for you!...

The car itself was an outcome of the affair. It was Mrs. Harrowdean's
idea, she thought chiefly of pleasant expeditions to friendly inns in
remote parts of the country, inns with a flavour of tacit complicity,
but it fell in very pleasantly with Mr. Britling's private resentment at
the extraordinary inconvenience of the railway communications between
Matching's Easy and her station at Pyecrafts, which involved a journey
to Liverpool Street and a long wait at a junction. And now the car was
smashed up--just when he had acquired skill enough to take it over to
Pyecrafts without shame, and on Tuesday or Wednesday at latest he would
have to depart in the old way by the London train....

Only the most superficial mind would assert nowadays that man is a
reasonable creature. Man is an unreasonable creature, and it was
entirely unreasonable and human for Mr. Britling during his nocturnal
self-reproaches to mix up his secret resentment at his infatuation for
Mrs. Harrowdean with his ill-advised attack upon the wall of Brandismead
Park. He ought never to have bought that car; he ought never to have
been so ready to meet Mrs. Harrowdean more than halfway.

What exacerbated his feeling about Mrs. Harrowdean was a new line she
had recently taken with regard to Mrs. Britling. From her first rash
assumption that Mr. Britling was indifferent to his wife, she had come
to realise that on the contrary he was in some ways extremely tender
about his wife. This struck her as an outrageous disloyalty. Instead of
appreciating a paradox she resented an infidelity. She smouldered with
perplexed resentment for some days, and then astonished her lover by a
series of