ation_
and pick you up and wipe the anger off you, and carry you out of it
all--into some quiet beautiful place."

"But one _has_ to answer these people," said Mr. Britling, rolling along
by the side of her like a full moon beside Venus, and quite artlessly
falling in with the tone of her.

She repeated lines from "The Silent Places" from memory. She threw quite
wonderful emotion into her voice. She made the words glow. And he had
only shown her the thing once....

Was he indeed burying a marvellous gift under the dust of current
affairs? When at last in the warm evening light they strolled back from
the summer-house to dinner he had definitely promised her that he would
take up and finish "The Silent Places."... And think over the Irish
pamphlet again before he published it....

Pyecrafts was like a crystal casket of finer soil withdrawn from the
tarred highways of the earth....

And yet the very next day this angel enemy of controversies broke out in
the most abominable way about Edith, and he had to tell her more plainly
than he had done hitherto, that he could not tolerate that sort of
thing. He wouldn't have Edith guyed. He wouldn't have Edith made to seem
base. And at that there was much trouble between them, and tears and
talk of Oliver....

Mr. Britling found himself unable to get on either with "The Silent
Places" or the pamphlet, and he was very unhappy....

Afterwards she repented very touchingly, and said that if only he would
love her she would swallow a thousand Ediths. He waived a certain
disrespect in the idea of her swallowing Edith, and they had a beautiful
reconciliation and talked of exalted things, and in the evening he
worked quite well upon "The Silent Places" and thought of half-a-dozen
quite wonderful lines, and in the course of the next day he returned to
Dower House and Mr. Direck and considerable piles of correspondence and
the completion of the Irish pamphlet.

But he was restless. He was more restless in his house than he had ever
been. He could not understand it. Everything about him was just as it
had always been, and yet it was unsatisfactory, and it seemed more
unstable than anything had ever seemed before. He was bored by the
solemn development of the Irish dispute; he was irritated by the
smouldering threat of the Balkans; he was irritated by the suffragettes
and by a string of irrational little strikes; by the general absence of
any main plot as it were to hold all these wr