twenty and he could find it in his heart to
grieve that he had ever given a thought to love again. He should have
lived a decent widower.... Then Edith had come into his life, Edith that
honest and unconscious defaulter. And there again he should have stuck
to his disappointment. He had stuck to it--nine days out of every ten.
It's the tenth day, it's the odd seductive moment, it's the instant of
confident pride--and there is your sanguine temperament in the ditch.

He began to recapitulate items in the catalogue of his escapades, and
the details of his automobile misadventures mixed themselves up with the
story of his heart steering. For example there was that tremendous
Siddons affair. He had been taking the corner of a girlish friendship
and he had taken it altogether too far. What a frightful mess that had
been! When once one is off the road anything may happen, from a crumpled
mud-guard to the car on the top of you. And there was his forty miles an
hour spurt with the great and gifted Delphine Marquise--for whom he was
to have written a play and been a perfect Annunzio. Until Willersley
appeared--very like the motor-cyclist--buzzing in the opposite
direction. And then had ensued angers, humiliations....

Had every man this sort of crowded catalogue? Was every
forty-five-year-old memory a dark tunnel receding from the star of
youth? It is surely a pity that life cannot end at thirty. It comes to
one clean and in perfect order....

Is experience worth having?

What a clean, straight thing the spirit of youth is. It is like a bright
new spear. It is like a finely tempered sword. The figure of his boy
took possession of his mind, his boy who looked out on the world with
his mother's, dark eyes, the slender son of that whole-hearted first
love. He was a being at once fine and simple, an intimate mystery. Must
he in his turn get dented and wrinkled and tarnished?

The boy was in trouble. What was the trouble?

Was it some form of the same trouble that had so tangled and tainted and
scarred the private pride of his father? And how was it possible for Mr.
Britling, disfigured by heedless misadventures, embarrassed by
complications and concealments, to help this honest youngster out of his
perplexities? He imagined possible forms of these perplexities.
Graceless forms. Ugly forms. Such forms as only the nocturnal
imagination would have dared present....

Oh, why had he been such a Britling? Why was he still such a Br