ation of a wonder round the corner that
he slipped the anchors of his humour and self-contempt and joined the
great cruising brotherhood of the Pilgrims of Love....

In fact--though he himself had never made a reckoning of it--he had
been upon eight separate cruises. He was now upon the eighth....

Between these various excursions--they took him round and about the
world, so to speak, they cast him away on tropical beaches, they left
him dismasted on desolate seas, they involved the most startling
interventions and the most inconvenient consequences--there were
interludes of penetrating philosophy. For some years the suspicion had
been growing up in Mr. Britling's mind that in planting this persuasion
in his being, the mysterious processes of Nature had been, perhaps for
some purely biological purpose, pulling, as people say, his leg, that
there were not these perfect responses, that loving a woman is a thing
one does thoroughly once for all--or so--and afterwards recalls
regrettably in a series of vain repetitions, and that the career of the
Pilgrim of Love, so soon as you strip off its credulous glamour, is
either the most pitiful or the most vulgar and vile of perversions from
the proper conduct of life. But this suspicion had not as yet grown to
prohibitive dimensions with him, it was not sufficient to resist the
seasons of high tide, the sudden promise of the salt-edged breeze, the
invitation of the hovering sea-bird; and he was now concealing beneath
the lively surface of activities with which Mr. Direck was now familiar,
a very extensive system of distresses arising out of the latest, the
eighth of these digressional adventures....

Mr. Britling had got into it very much as he had got into the ditch on
the morning before his smash. He hadn't thought the affair out and he
hadn't looked carefully enough. And it kept on developing in just the
ways he would rather that it didn't.

The seventh affair had been very disconcerting. He had made a fool of
himself with quite a young girl; he blushed to think how young; it
hadn't gone very far, but it had made his nocturnal reflections so
disagreeable that he had--by no means for the first time--definitely
and forever given up these foolish dreams of love. And when Mrs.
Harrowdean swam into his circle, she seemed just exactly what was wanted
to keep his imagination out of mischief. She came bearing flattery to
the pitch of adoration. She was the brightest and cleverest of