Mr. Britling’s nerves, and he replied with a letter intended to be conciliatory, but which degenerated into earnest reproaches for her “unreasonableness.”  Meanwhile she had received his second and tenderly eloquent letter; it moved her deeply, and having now cleared her mind of much that had kept it simmering uncomfortably, she replied with a sweetly loving epistle.  From this point their correspondence had a kind of double quality, being intermittently angry and loving; her third letter was tender, and it was tenderly answered in his fourth; but in the interim she had received his third and answered it with considerable acerbity, to which his fifth was a retort, just missing her generous and conclusive fifth.  She replied to his fifth on a Saturday evening—­it was that eventful Saturday, Saturday the First of August, 1914—­by a telegram.  Oliver was abroad in Holland, engaged in a much-needed emotional rest, and she wired to Mr. Britling:  “Have wired for Oliver, he will come to me, do not trouble to answer this.”

She was astonished to get no reply for two days.  She got no reply for two days because remarkable things were happening to the telegraph wires of England just then, and her message, in the hands of a boy scout on a bicycle, reached Mr. Britling’s house only on Monday afternoon.  He was then at Claverings discussing the invasion of Belgium that made Britain’s participation in the war inevitable, and he did not open the little red-brown envelope until about half-past six.  He failed to mark the date and hours upon it, but he perceived that it was essentially a challenge.  He was expected, he saw, to go over at once with his renovated Gladys and end this unfortunate clash forever in one striking and passionate scene.  His mind was now so full of the war that he found this the most colourless and unattractive of obligations.  But he felt bound by the mysterious code of honour of the illicit love affair to play his part.  He postponed his departure until after supper—­there was no reason why he should be afraid of motoring by moonlight if he went carefully—­because Hugh came in with Cissie demanding a game of hockey.  Hockey offered a nervous refreshment, a scampering forgetfulness of the tremendous disaster of this war he had always believed impossible, that nothing else could do, and he was very glad indeed of the irruption....

Section 10

For days the broader side of Mr. Britling’s mind, as distinguished from its egotistical edge, had been reflecting more and more vividly and coherently the spectacle of civilisation casting aside the thousand dispersed activities of peace, clutching its weapons and setting its teeth, for a supreme struggle against militarist imperialism.  From the point of view of Matching’s Easy that colossal crystallising of accumulated antagonisms was for a time no more than a confusion of headlines and a rearrangement of columns in the white windows of the newspapers