imaginative inertness, he could still admire and respect her steady dignity and her consistent honourableness.  Her practical capacity was for him a matter for continual self-congratulation.  He marked the bright order of her household, her flowering borders, the prosperous high-born roses of her garden with a wondering appreciation.  He had never been able to keep anything in order.  He relied more and more upon her.  He showed his respect for her by a scrupulous attention to her dignity, and his confidence by a franker and franker emotional neglect.  Because she expressed so little he succeeded in supposing she felt little, and since nothing had come out of the brown depths of her eyes he saw fit at last to suppose no plumb-line would ever find anything there.  He pursued his interests; he reached out to this and that; he travelled; she made it a matter of conscience to let him go unhampered; she felt, she thought—­unrecorded; he did, and he expressed and re-expressed and over-expressed, and started this and that with quick irrepressible activity, and so there had accumulated about them the various items of the life to whose more ostensible accidents Mr. Direck was now for an indefinite period joined.

It was in the nature of Mr. Britling to incur things; it was in the nature of Mrs. Britling to establish them.  Mr. Britling had taken the Dower House on impulse, and she had made it a delightful home.  He had discovered the disorderly delights of mixed Sunday hockey one week-end at Pontings that had promised to be dull, and she had made it an institution....  He had come to her with his orphan boy and a memory of a passionate first loss that sometimes, and more particularly at first, he seemed to have forgotten altogether, and at other times was only too evidently lamenting with every fibre of his being.  She had taken the utmost care of the relics of her duskily pretty predecessor that she found in unexpected abundance in Mr. Britling’s possession, and she had done her duty by her sometimes rather incomprehensible stepson.  She never allowed herself to examine the state of her heart towards this youngster; it is possible that she did not perceive the necessity for any such examination....

So she went through life, outwardly serene and dignified, one of a great company of rather fastidious, rather unenterprising women who have turned for their happiness to secondary things, to those fair inanimate things of household and garden which do not turn again and rend one, to aestheticisms and delicacies, to order and seemliness.  Moreover she found great satisfaction in the health and welfare, the growth and animation of her own two little boys.  And no one knew, and perhaps even she had contrived to forget, the phases of astonishment and disillusionment, of doubt and bitterness and secret tears, that spread out through the years in which she had slowly realised that this strange, fitful, animated man who had come to her, vowing himself hers, asking for her so urgently and persuasively, was ceasing, had ceased, to love her, that his heart had escaped her, that she had missed it; she never dreamt that she had hurt it, and that after its first urgent, tumultuous, incomprehensible search for her it had hidden itself bitterly away....