Their disposition towards under-feeding and a certain lack of fine sentiment were the only flaws in the English scheme that Herr Heinrich admitted.  He certainly found the English unfeeling.  His heart went even less satisfied than his Magen.  He was a being of expressive affections; he wanted great friendships, mysterious relationships, love.  He tried very bravely to revere and to understand and be occultly understood by Mr. Britling; he sought long walks and deep talks with Hugh and the small boys; he tried to fill his heart with Cissie; he found at last marvels of innocence and sweetness in the Hickson girl.  She wore her hair in a pigtail when first he met her, and it made her almost Marguerite.  This young man had cried aloud for love, warm and filling, like the Mittagsessen that was implicit in their understanding.  And all these Essex people failed to satisfy him; they were silent, they were subtle, they slipped through the fat yet eager fingers of his heart, so that he fell back at last upon himself and his German correspondents and the idealisation of Maud Hickson and the moral education of Billy.  Billy.  Mr. Britling’s memories came back at last to the figure of young Heinrich with the squirrel on his shoulder, that had so often stood in the way of the utter condemnation of Germany.  That, seen closely, was the stuff of one brutal Prussian.  What quarrel had we with him?...

Other memories of Heinrich flitted across Mr. Britling’s reverie.  Heinrich at hockey, running with extreme swiftness and little skill, tricked and baffled by Letty, dodged by Hugh, going headlong forward and headlong back, and then with a cry flinging himself flat on the ground exhausted....  Or again Heinrich very grave and very pink, peering through his glasses at his cards at Skat....  Or Heinrich in the boats upon the great pond, or Heinrich swimming, or Heinrich hiding very, very artfully from the boys about the garden on a theory of his own, or Heinrich in strange postures, stalking the deer in Claverings Park.  For a time he had had a great ambition to creep quite close to a deer and touch it....  Or Heinrich indexing.  He had a passion for listing and indexing books, music, any loose classifiable thing.  His favourite amusement was devising schemes for the indentation of dictionary leaves, so that one could turn instantly to the needed word.  He had bought and cut the edges of three dictionaries; each in succession improved upon the other; he had had great hopes of patents and wealth arising therefrom....  And his room had been a source of strange sounds; his search for music upon the violin.  He had hoped when he came to Matching’s Easy to join “some string quartette.”  But Matching’s Easy produced no string quartette.  He had to fall back upon the pianola, and try to play duets with that.  Only the pianola did all the duet itself, and in the hands of a small Britling was apt to betray a facetious moodiness; sudden alternations between extreme haste and extreme lassitude....