“Sometimes I think he’s righter than I am.  Sometimes I think he is only madder.”

Section 15

These letters weighed heavily upon Mr. Britling’s mind.  He perceived that this precociously wise, subtle youngster of his was now close up to the line of injury and death, going to and fro from it, in a perpetual, fluctuating danger.  At any time now in the day or night the evil thing might wing its way to him.  If Mr. Britling could have prayed, he would have prayed for Hugh.  He began and never finished some ineffectual prayers.

He tried to persuade himself of a Roman stoicism; that he would be sternly proud, sternly satisfied, if this last sacrifice for his country was demanded from him.  He perceived he was merely humbugging himself....

This war had no longer the simple greatness that would make any such stern happiness possible....

The disaster to Teddy and Mrs. Teddy hit him hard.  He winced at the thought of Mrs. Teddy’s white face; the unspoken accusation in her eyes.  He felt he could never bring himself to say his one excuse to her:  “I did not keep Hugh back.  If I had done that, then you might have the right to blame.”

If he had overcome every other difficulty in the way to an heroic pose there was still Hugh’s unconquerable lucidity of outlook.  War was a madness....

But what else was to be done?  What else could be done?  We could not give in to Germany.  If a lunatic struggles, sane men must struggle too....

Mr. Britling had ceased to write about the war at all.  All his later writings about it had been abandoned unfinished.  He could not imagine them counting, affecting any one, producing any effect.  Indeed he was writing now very intermittently.  His contributions to The Times had fallen away.  He was perpetually thinking now about the war, about life and death, about the religious problems that had seemed so remote in the days of the peace; but none of his thinking would become clear and definite enough for writing.  All the clear stars of his mind were hidden by the stormy clouds of excitement that the daily newspaper perpetually renewed and by the daily developments of life.  And just as his professional income shrank before his mental confusion and impotence, the private income that came from his and his wife’s investments became uncertain.  She had had two thousand pounds in the Constantinople loan, seven hundred in debentures of the Ottoman railway; he had held similar sums in two Hungarian and one Bulgarian loan, in a linoleum factory at Rouen and in a Swiss Hotel company.  All these stopped payments, and the dividends from their other investments shrank.  There seemed no limit set to the possibilities of shrinkage of capital and income.  Income tax had leapt to colossal dimensions, the cost of most things had risen, and the tangle of life was now increased by the need for retrenchments and economies.