st wife or continued only in his love for their son. He
had married in the glow of youth, he had had two years of clean and
simple loving, helping, quarrelling and the happy ending of quarrels.
Something went out of him into all that, which could not be renewed
again. In his first extremity of grief he knew that perfectly well--and
then afterwards he forgot it. While there is life there is imagination,
which makes and forgets and goes on.

He met Edith under circumstances that did not in any way recall his lost
Mary. He met her, as people say, "socially"; Mary, on the other hand,
had been a girl at Newnham while he was a fellow of Pembroke, and there
had been something of accident and something of furtiveness in their
lucky discovery of each other. There had been a flush in it; there was
dash in it. But Edith he saw and chose and had to woo. There was no
rushing together; there was solicitation and assent. Edith was a
Bachelor of Science of London University and several things like that,
and she looked upon the universe under her broad forehead and
broad-waving brown hair with quiet watchful eyes that had nothing
whatever to hide, a thing so incredible to Mr. Britling that he had
loved and married her very largely for the serenity of her mystery. And
for a time after their marriage he sailed over those brown depths
plumbing furiously.

Of course he did not make his former passion for Mary at all clear to
her. Indeed, while he was winning Edith it was by no means clear to
himself. He was making a new emotional drama, and consciously and
subconsciously he dismissed a hundred reminiscences that sought to
invade the new experience, and which would have been out of key with it.
And without any deliberate intention to that effect he created an
atmosphere between himself and Edith in which any discussion of Mary was
reduced to a minimum, and in which Hugh was accepted rather than
explained. He contrived to believe that she understood all sorts of
unsayable things; he invented miracles of quite uncongenial mute
mutuality....

It was over the chess-board that they first began to discover their
extensive difficulties of sympathy. Mr. Britling's play was
characterised by a superficial brilliance, much generosity and extreme
unsoundness; he always moved directly his opponent had done so--and then
reflected on the situation. His reflection was commonly much wiser than
his moves. Mrs. Britling was, as it were, a natural antagonist