These fluctuating lapses from individuation made Mr. Britling a perplexity to many who judged only by the old personal standards.  At times he seemed a monster of cantankerous self-righteousness, whom nobody could please or satisfy, but indeed when he was most pitiless about the faults of his race or nation he was really reproaching himself, and when he seemed more egotistical and introspective and self-centred he was really ransacking himself for a clue to that same confusion of purposes that waste the hope and strength of humanity.  And now through the busy distresses of the night it would have perplexed a watching angel to have drawn the line and shown when Mr. Britling, was grieving for his own loss and humiliation and when he was grieving for these common human weaknesses of which he had so large a share.

And this double refraction of his mind by which a concentrated and individualised Britling did but present a larger impersonal Britling beneath, carried with it a duplication of his conscience and sense of responsibility.  To his personal conscience he was answerable for his private honour and his debts and the Dower House he had made and so on, but to his impersonal conscience he was answerable for the whole world.  The world from the latter point of view was his egg.  He had a subconscious delusion that he had laid it.  He had a subconscious suspicion that he had let it cool and that it was addled.  He had an urgency to incubate it.  The variety and interest of his talk was largely due to that persuasion, it was a perpetual attempt to spread his mental feathers over the task before him....

Section 3

After this much of explanation it is possible to go on to the task which originally brought Mr. Direck to Matching’s Easy, the task that Massachusetts society had sent him upon, the task of organising the mental unveiling of Mr. Britling.  Mr. Direck saw Mr. Britling only in the daylight, and with an increasing distraction of the attention towards Miss Cecily Corner.  We may see him rather more clearly in the darkness, without any distraction except his own.

Now the smashing of Gladys was not only the source of a series of reproaches and remorses directly arising out of the smash; it had also a wide system of collateral consequences, which were also banging and blundering their way through the Britling mind.  It was extraordinarily inconvenient in quite another direction that the automobile should be destroyed.  It upset certain plans of Mr. Britling’s in a direction growing right out from all the Dower House world in which Mr. Direck supposed him to be completely set and rooted.  There were certain matters from which Mr. Britling had been averting his mind most strenuously throughout the week-end.  Now, there was no averting his mind any more.

Mr. Britling was entangled in a love affair.  It was, to be exact, and disregarding minor affinities, his eighth love affair.  And the new automobile, so soon as he could drive it efficiently, was to have played quite a solvent and conclusive part in certain entangled complications of this relationship.