“This contrast between Heinrich’s carefulness and Teddy’s easy-goingness, come to look at it, is I suppose one of the most fundamental in the world.  It reaches to everything.  It mixes up with education, statecraft, morals.  Will you make or will you take?  Those are the two extreme courses in all such things.  I suppose the answer of wisdom to that is, like all wise answers, a compromise.  I suppose one must accept and then make all one can of it....  Have you talked at all to my eldest son?”

“He’s a very interesting young man indeed,” said Mr. Direck.  “I should venture to say there’s a very great deal in him.  I was most impressed by the few words I had with him.”

“There, for example, is one of my perplexities,” said Mr. Britling.

Mr. Direck waited for some further light on this sudden transition.

“Ah! your troubles in life haven’t begun yet.  Wait till you’re a father.  That cuts to the bone.  You have the most delicate thing in the world in hand, a young kindred mind.  You feel responsible for it, you know you are responsible for it; and you lose touch with it.  You can’t get at it.  Nowadays we’ve lost the old tradition of fatherhood by divine right—­and we haven’t got a new one.  I’ve tried not to be a cramping ruler, a director, a domestic tyrant to that lad—­and in effect it’s meant his going his own way....  I don’t dominate.  I hoped to advise.  But you see he loves my respect and good opinion.  Too much.  When things go well I know of them.  When the world goes dark for him, then he keeps his trouble from me.  Just when I would so eagerly go into it with him....  There’s something the matter now, something—­it may be grave.  I feel he wants to tell me.  And there it is!—­it seems I am the last person to whom he can humiliate himself by a confession of blundering, or weakness....  Something I should just laugh at and say, ’That’s in the blood of all of us, dear Spit of myself.  Let’s see what’s to be done.’...”

He paused and then went on, finding in the unfamiliarity and transitoriness of his visitor a freedom he might have failed to find in a close friend.

“I am frightened at times at all I don’t know about in that boy’s mind.  I know nothing of his religiosities.  He’s my son and he must have religiosities.  I know nothing of his ideas or of his knowledge about sex and all that side of life.  I do not know of the things he finds beautiful.  I can guess at times; that’s all; when he betrays himself....  You see, you don’t know really what love is until you have children.  One doesn’t love women.  Indeed you don’t!  One gives and gets; it’s a trade.  One may have tremendous excitements and expectations and overwhelming desires.  That’s all very well in its way.  But the love of children is an exquisite tenderness:  it rends the heart.  It’s a thing of God.  And I lie awake at nights and stretch out my hands in the darkness to this lad—­who will never know—­until his sons come in their time....”