addled. He had an
urgency to incubate it. The variety and interest of his talk was largely
due to that persuasion, it was a perpetual attempt to spread his mental
feathers over the task before him....

Section 3

After this much of explanation it is possible to go on to the task which
originally brought Mr. Direck to Matching's Easy, the task that
Massachusetts society had sent him upon, the task of organising the
mental unveiling of Mr. Britling. Mr. Direck saw Mr. Britling only in
the daylight, and with an increasing distraction of the attention
towards Miss Cecily Corner. We may see him rather _more_ clearly in the
darkness, without any distraction except his own.

Now the smashing of Gladys was not only the source of a series of
reproaches and remorses directly arising out of the smash; it had also a
wide system of collateral consequences, which were also banging and
blundering their way through the Britling mind. It was extraordinarily
inconvenient in quite another direction that the automobile should be
destroyed. It upset certain plans of Mr. Britling's in a direction
growing right out from all the Dower House world in which Mr. Direck
supposed him to be completely set and rooted. There were certain matters
from which Mr. Britling had been averting his mind most strenuously
throughout the week-end. Now, there was no averting his mind any more.

Mr. Britling was entangled in a love affair. It was, to be exact, and
disregarding minor affinities, his eighth love affair. And the new
automobile, so soon as he could drive it efficiently, was to have played
quite a solvent and conclusive part in certain entangled complications
of this relationship.

A man of lively imagination and quick impulses naturally has love
affairs as he drives himself through life, just as he naturally has
accidents if he drives an automobile.

And the peculiar relations that existed between Mr. Britling and Mrs.
Britling tended inevitably to make these love affairs troublesome,
undignified and futile. Especially when they were viewed from the point
of view of insomnia.

Mr. Britling's first marriage had been a passionately happy one. His
second was by comparison a marriage in neutral tint. There is much to be
said for that extreme Catholic theory which would make marriage not
merely lifelong but eternal. Certainly Mr. Britling would have been a
finer if not a happier creature if his sentimental existence could have
died with his fir