h he had told himself as much that he was not. But then, on the
other hand, it was equally manifest in its subdued and ignored way that
as a matter of fact she was hardly more in love with him. What
constituted the satisfactoriness of the whole affair was its essential
unlovingness and friendly want of emotion. It left their minds free to
play with all the terms and methods of love without distress. She could
summon tears and delights as one summons servants, and he could act his
part as lover with no sense of lost control. They supplied in each
other's lives a long-felt want--if only, that is, she could control her
curious aptitude for jealousy and the sexual impulse to vex. There, he
felt, she broke the convention of their relations and brought in serious
realities, and this little rift it was that had widened to a now
considerable breach. He knew that in every sane moment she dreaded and
wished to heal that breach as much as he did. But the deep simplicities
of the instincts they had tacitly agreed to bridge over washed the piers
of their reconciliation away.

And unless they could restore the bridge things would end, and Mr.
Britling felt that the ending of things would involve for him the most
extraordinary exasperation. She would go to Oliver for comfort; she
would marry Oliver; and he knew her well enough to be sure that she
would thrust her matrimonial happiness with Oliver unsparingly upon his
attention; while he, on the other hand, being provided with no
corresponding Olivette, would be left, a sort of emotional celibate,
with his slack times and his afternoons and his general need for
flattery and amusement dreadfully upon his own hands. He would be
tormented by jealousy. In which case--and here he came to verities--his
work would suffer. It wouldn't grip him while all these vague demands
she satisfied fermented unassuaged.

And, after the fashion of our still too adolescent world, Mr. Britling
and Mrs. Harrowdean proceeded to negotiate these extremely unromantic
matters in the phrases of that simple, honest and youthful
passionateness which is still the only language available, and at times
Mr. Britling came very near persuading himself that he had something of
the passionate love for her that he had once had for his Mary, and that
the possible loss of her had nothing to do with the convenience of
Pyecrafts or any discretion in the world. Though indeed the only thing
in the whole plexus of emotional possibi