with the clean star of youth.
As Hugh was....

In those days he had had no amiable doctrine of compromise. He had
truckled to no "domesticated God," but talked of the "pitiless truth";
he had tolerated no easy-going pseudo-aristocratic social system, but
dreamt of such a democracy "mewing its mighty youth" as the world had
never seen. He had thought that his brains were to do their share in
building up this great national _imago_, winged, divine, out of the
clumsy, crawling, snobbish, comfort-loving caterpillar of Victorian
England. With such dreams his life had started, and the light of them,
perhaps, had helped him to his rapid success. And then his wife had
died, and he had married again and become somehow more interested in his
income, and then the rather expensive first of the eight experiences had
drained off so much of his imaginative energy, and the second had
drained off so much, and there had been quarrels and feuds, and the way
had been lost, and the days had passed. He hadn't failed. Indeed he
counted as a success among his generation. He alone, in the night
watches, could gauge the quality of that success. He was widely known,
reputably known; he prospered. Much had come, oh! by a mysterious luck,
but everything was doomed by his invincible defects. Beneath that
hollow, enviable show there ached waste. Waste, waste, waste--his heart,
his imagination, his wife, his son, his country--his automobile....

Then there flashed into his mind a last straw of disagreeable
realisation.

He hadn't as yet insured his automobile! He had meant to do so. The
papers were on his writing-desk.

Section 7

On these black nights, when the personal Mr. Britling would lie awake
thinking how unsatisfactorily Mr. Britling was going on, and when the
impersonal Mr. Britling would be thinking how unsatisfactorily his
universe was going on, the whole mental process had a likeness to some
complex piece of orchestral music wherein the organ deplored the
melancholy destinies of the race while the piccolo lamented the secret
trouble of Mrs. Harrowdean; the big drum thundered at the Irish
politicians, and all the violins bewailed the intellectual laxity of the
university system. Meanwhile the trumpets prophesied wars and disasters,
the cymbals ever and again inserted a clashing jar about the fatal delay
in the automobile insurance, while the triangle broke into a plangent
solo on the topic of a certain rotten gate-post he always fo