Mr. Britling had got into it very much as he had got into the ditch on the morning before his smash.  He hadn’t thought the affair out and he hadn’t looked carefully enough.  And it kept on developing in just the ways he would rather that it didn’t.

The seventh affair had been very disconcerting.  He had made a fool of himself with quite a young girl; he blushed to think how young; it hadn’t gone very far, but it had made his nocturnal reflections so disagreeable that he had—­by no means for the first time—­definitely and forever given up these foolish dreams of love.  And when Mrs. Harrowdean swam into his circle, she seemed just exactly what was wanted to keep his imagination out of mischief.  She came bearing flattery to the pitch of adoration.  She was the brightest and cleverest of young widows.  She wrote quite admirably criticism in the Scrutator and the Sectarian, and occasionally poetry in the Right Review—­when she felt disposed to do so.  She had an intermittent vein of high spirits that was almost better than humour and made her quickly popular with most of the people she met, and she was only twenty miles away in her pretty house and her absurd little jolly park.

There was something, she said, in his thought and work that was like walking in mountains.  She came to him because she wanted to clamber about the peaks and glens of his mind.

It was natural to reply that he wasn’t by any means the serene mountain elevation she thought him, except perhaps for a kind of loneliness....

She was a great reader of eighteenth century memoirs, and some she conveyed to him.  Her mental quality was all in the vein of the friendships of Rousseau and Voltaire, and pleasantly and trippingly she led him along the primrose path of an intellectual liaison.  She came first to Matching’s Easy, where she was sweet and bright and vividly interested and a great contrast to Mrs. Britling, and then he and she met in London, and went off together with a fine sense of adventure for a day at Richmond, and then he took some work with him to her house and stayed there....

Then she went away into Scotland for a time and he wanted her again tremendously and clamoured for her eloquently, and then it was apparent and admitted between them that they were admirably in love, oh! immensely in love.

The transitions from emotional mountaineering to ardent intimacies were so rapid and impulsive that each phase obliterated its predecessor, and it was only with a vague perplexity that Mr. Britling found himself transferred from the role of a mountainous objective for pretty little pilgrims to that of a sedulous lover in pursuit of the happiness of one of the most uncertain, intricate, and entrancing of feminine personalities.  This was not at all his idea of the proper relations between men and women, but Mrs. Harrowdean had a way of challenging his gallantry.  She made him run about for her; she did not demand but she commanded