A man of lively imagination and quick impulses naturally has love affairs as he drives himself through life, just as he naturally has accidents if he drives an automobile.

And the peculiar relations that existed between Mr. Britling and Mrs. Britling tended inevitably to make these love affairs troublesome, undignified and futile.  Especially when they were viewed from the point of view of insomnia.

Mr. Britling’s first marriage had been a passionately happy one.  His second was by comparison a marriage in neutral tint.  There is much to be said for that extreme Catholic theory which would make marriage not merely lifelong but eternal.  Certainly Mr. Britling would have been a finer if not a happier creature if his sentimental existence could have died with his first wife or continued only in his love for their son.  He had married in the glow of youth, he had had two years of clean and simple loving, helping, quarrelling and the happy ending of quarrels.  Something went out of him into all that, which could not be renewed again.  In his first extremity of grief he knew that perfectly well—­and then afterwards he forgot it.  While there is life there is imagination, which makes and forgets and goes on.

He met Edith under circumstances that did not in any way recall his lost Mary.  He met her, as people say, “socially”; Mary, on the other hand, had been a girl at Newnham while he was a fellow of Pembroke, and there had been something of accident and something of furtiveness in their lucky discovery of each other.  There had been a flush in it; there was dash in it.  But Edith he saw and chose and had to woo.  There was no rushing together; there was solicitation and assent.  Edith was a Bachelor of Science of London University and several things like that, and she looked upon the universe under her broad forehead and broad-waving brown hair with quiet watchful eyes that had nothing whatever to hide, a thing so incredible to Mr. Britling that he had loved and married her very largely for the serenity of her mystery.  And for a time after their marriage he sailed over those brown depths plumbing furiously.

Of course he did not make his former passion for Mary at all clear to her.  Indeed, while he was winning Edith it was by no means clear to himself.  He was making a new emotional drama, and consciously and subconsciously he dismissed a hundred reminiscences that sought to invade the new experience, and which would have been out of key with it.  And without any deliberate intention to that effect he created an atmosphere between himself and Edith in which any discussion of Mary was reduced to a minimum, and in which Hugh was accepted rather than explained.  He contrived to believe that she understood all sorts of unsayable things; he invented miracles of quite uncongenial mute mutuality....