Hell perhaps is only one such incident, indefinitely prolonged....

Anything might have been there in front of him.  And indeed now, out of the dreamland to which he could not escape something had come, something that screamed sharply....

“Good God!” he cried, “if I had hit a child!  I might have hit a child!” The hypothesis flashed into being with the thought, tried to escape and was caught.  It was characteristic of Mr. Britling’s nocturnal imagination that he should individualise this child quite sharply as rather plain and slender, with reddish hair, staring eyes, and its ribs crushed in a vivid and dreadful manner, pinned against the wall, mixed up with some bricks, only to be extracted, oh! horribly.

But this was not fair!  He had hurt no child!  He had merely pitched out Mr. Direck and broken his arm....

It wasn’t his merit that the child hadn’t been there!

The child might have been there!

Mere luck.

He lay staring in despair—­as an involuntary God might stare at many a thing in this amazing universe—­staring at the little victim his imagination had called into being only to destroy....

Section 2

If he had not crushed a child other people had.  Such things happened.  Vicariously at any rate he had crushed many children....

Why are children ever crushed?

And suddenly all the pain and destruction and remorse of all the accidents in the world descended upon Mr. Britling.

No longer did he ask why am I such a fool, but why are we all such fools?  He became Man on the automobile of civilisation, crushing his thousands daily in his headlong and yet aimless career....

That was a trick of Mr. Britling’s mind.  It had this tendency to spread outward from himself to generalised issues.  Many minds are like that nowadays.  He was not so completely individualised as people are supposed to be individualised—­in our law, in our stories, in our moral judgments.  He had a vicarious factor.  He could slip from concentrated reproaches to the liveliest remorse for himself as The Automobilist in General, or for himself as England, or for himself as Man.  From remorse for smashing his guest and his automobile he could pass by what was for him the most imperceptible of transitions to remorse for every accident that has ever happened through the error of an automobilist since automobiles began.  All that long succession of blunderers became Mr. Britling.  Or rather Mr. Britling became all that vast succession of blunderers.