rising women who have
turned for their happiness to secondary things, to those fair inanimate
things of household and garden which do not turn again and rend one, to
aestheticisms and delicacies, to order and seemliness. Moreover she
found great satisfaction in the health and welfare, the growth and
animation of her own two little boys. And no one knew, and perhaps even
she had contrived to forget, the phases of astonishment and
disillusionment, of doubt and bitterness and secret tears, that spread
out through the years in which she had slowly realised that this
strange, fitful, animated man who had come to her, vowing himself hers,
asking for her so urgently and persuasively, was ceasing, had ceased, to
love her, that his heart had escaped her, that she had missed it; she
never dreamt that she had hurt it, and that after its first urgent,
tumultuous, incomprehensible search for her it had hidden itself
bitterly away....

Section 4

The mysterious processes of nature that had produced Mr. Britling had
implanted in him an obstinate persuasion that somewhere in the world,
from some human being, it was still possible to find the utmost
satisfaction for every need and craving. He could imagine as existing,
as waiting for him, he knew not where, a completeness of understanding,
a perfection of response, that would reach all the gamut of his feelings
and sensations from the most poetical to the most entirely physical, a
beauty of relationship so transfiguring that not only would she--it went
without saying that this completion was a woman--be perfectly beautiful
in its light but, what was manifestly more incredible, that he too would
be perfectly beautiful and quite at his ease.... In her presence there
could be no self-reproaches, no lapses, no limitations, nothing but
happiness and the happiest activities.... To such a persuasion half the
imaginative people in the world succumb as readily and naturally as
ducklings take to water. They do not doubt its truth any more than a
thirsty camel doubts that presently it will come to a spring.

This persuasion is as foolish as though a camel hoped that some day it
would drink from such a spring that it would never thirst again. For the
most part Mr. Britling ignored its presence in his mind, and resisted
the impulses it started. But at odd times, and more particularly in the
afternoon and while travelling and in between books, Mr. Britling so far
succumbed to this strange expect