her on the instalment
system, which she'd smashed up. No, that sort of thing comes later....
I'll just put myself down on the waiting list of one of those bits of
delight in the Cambridge tobacco shops--and go on with my studies for a
year or two...."

Section 6

Though Mr. Britling's anxiety about his son was dispelled, his mind
remained curiously apprehensive throughout July. He had a feeling that
things were not going well with the world, a feeling he tried in vain to
dispel by various distractions. Perhaps some subtler subconscious
analysis of the situation was working out probabilities that his
conscious self would not face. And when presently he bicycled off to
Mrs. Harrowdean for flattery, amusement, and comfort generally, he found
her by no means the exalting confirmation of everything he wished to
believe about himself and the universe, that had been her delightful
role in the early stages of their romantic friendship. She maintained
her hostility to Edith; she seemed bent on making things impossible. And
yet there were one or two phases of the old sustaining intimacies.

They walked across her absurd little park to the summer-house with the
view on the afternoon of his arrival, and they discussed the Irish
pamphlet which was now nearly finished.

"Of course," she said, "it will be a wonderful pamphlet."

There was a reservation in her voice that made him wait.

"But I suppose all sorts of people could write an Irish pamphlet. Nobody
but you could write 'The Silent Places.' Oh, _why_ don't you finish that
great beautiful thing, and leave all this world of reality and
newspapers, all these Crude, Vulgar, Quarrelsome, Jarring things to
other people? You have the magic gift, you might be a poet, you can take
us out of all these horrid things that are, away to Beautyland, and you
are just content to be a critic and a disputer. It's your surroundings.
It's your sordid realities. It's that Practicality at your elbow. You
ought never to see a newspaper. You ought never to have an American come
within ten miles of you. You ought to live on bowls of milk drunk in
valleys of asphodel."

Mr. Britling, who liked this sort of thing in a way, and yet at the same
time felt ridiculously distended and altogether preposterous while it
was going on, answered feebly and self-consciously.

"There was your letter in the _Nation_ the other day," she said. "Why
_do_ you get drawn into arguments? I wanted to rush into the _N