seen as a waving hat receding along the top of
the dog-rose hedge that ran beyond the hockey field towards the village.

"He will see Germany long before I shall," said Herr Heinrich with a
gust of nostalgia. "I wish almost I had not agreed to go to Boulogne."

And for some days Miss Cecily Corner was a very grave and dignified
young woman indeed. Pondering....

Section 9

After the departure of Mr. Direck things international began to move
forward with great rapidity. It was exactly as if his American
deliberation had hitherto kept things waiting. Before his postcard from
Rotterdam reached the Dower House Austria had sent an ultimatum to
Serbia, and before Cecily had got the letter he wrote her from Cologne,
a letter in that curiously unformed handwriting the stenographer and the
typewriter are making an American characteristic, Russia was mobilising,
and the vast prospect of a European war had opened like the rolling up
of a curtain on which the interests of the former week had been but a
trivial embroidery. So insistent was this reality that revealed itself
that even the shooting of the Dublin people after the gun-running of
Howth was dwarfed to unimportance. The mind of Mr. Britling came round
from its restless wanderings to a more and more intent contemplation of
the hurrying storm-clouds that swept out of nothingness to blacken all
his sky. He watched it, he watched amazed and incredulous, he watched
this contradiction of all his reiterated confessions of faith in German
sanity and pacifism, he watched it with all that was impersonal in his
being, and meanwhile his personal life ran in a continually deeper and
narrower channel as his intelligence was withdrawn from it.

Never had the double refraction of his mind been more clearly defined.
On the one hand the Britling of the disinterested intelligence saw the
habitual peace of the world vanish as the daylight vanishes when a
shutter falls over the window of a cell; and on the other the Britling
of the private life saw all the pleasant comfort of his relations with
Mrs. Harrowdean disappearing in a perplexing irrational quarrel. He did
not want to lose Mrs. Harrowdean; he contemplated their breach with a
profound and profoundly selfish dismay. It seemed the wanton termination
of an arrangement of which he was only beginning to perceive the extreme
and irreplaceable satisfactoriness.

It wasn't that he was in love with her. He knew almost as clearly as
thoug