fineness.  He was a creature of the most delicate and rapid responses....  These aren’t my fond delusions.  It was so....  You know, when he was only a few days old, he would start suddenly at any strange sound.  He was alive like an AEolian harp from the very beginning....  And his hair when he was born—­he had a lot of hair—­was like the down on the breast of a bird.  I remember that now very vividly—­and how I used to like to pass my hand over it.  It was silk, spun silk.  Before he was two he could talk—­whole sentences.  He had the subtlest ear.  He loved long words....  And then,” he said with tears in his voice, “all this beautiful fine structure, this brain, this fresh life as nimble as water—­as elastic as a steel spring, it is destroyed....

“I don’t make out he wasn’t human.  Often and often I have been angry with him, and disappointed in him.  There were all sorts of weaknesses in him.  We all knew them.  And we didn’t mind them.  We loved him the better.  And his odd queer cleverness!....  And his profound wisdom.  And then all this beautiful and delicate fabric, all those clear memories in his dear brain, all his whims, his sudden inventions....

“You know, I have had a letter from his chum Park.  He was shot through a loophole.  The bullet went through his eye and brow....  Think of it!

“An amazement ... a blow ... a splattering of blood.  Rags of tormented skin and brain stuff....  In a moment.  What had taken eighteen years—­love and care....”

He sat thinking for an interval, and then went on, “The reading and writing alone!  I taught him to read myself—­because his first governess, you see, wasn’t very clever.  She was a very good methodical sort, but she had no inspiration.  So I got up all sorts of methods for teaching him to read.  But it wasn’t necessary.  He seemed to leap all sorts of difficulties.  He leapt to what one was trying to teach him.  It was as quick as the movement of some wild animal....

“He came into life as bright and quick as this robin looking for food....

“And he’s broken up and thrown away....  Like a cartridge case by the side of a covert....”

He choked and stopped speaking.  His elbows were on his knees, and he put his face between his hands and shuddered and became still.  His hair was troubled.  The end of his stumpy moustache and a little roll of flesh stood out at the side of his hand, and made him somehow twice as pitiful.  His big atlas, from which papers projected, seemed forgotten by his side.  So he sat for a long time, and neither he nor Letty moved or spoke.  But they were in the same shadow.  They found great comfort in one another.  They had not been so comforted before since their losses came upon them.

Section 9

It was Mr. Britling who broke silence.  And when he drew his hands down from his face and spoke, he said one of the most amazing and unexpected things she had ever heard in her life.