You see, if Mrs. Harrowdean had left Mrs. Britling alone everything would have been quite tolerable.  He considered Mrs. Harrowdean a charming human being, and altogether better than he deserved.  Ever so much better.  She was all initiative and response and that sort of thing.  And she was so discreet.  She had her own reputation to think about, and one or two of her predecessors—­God rest the ashes of those fires!—­had not been so discreet.  Yet one could not have this sort of thing going on behind Edith’s back.  All sorts of things one might have going on behind Edith’s back, but not this writing and saying of perfectly beastly things about Edith.  Nothing could alter the fact that Edith was his honour....

Section 5

Throughout the week-end Mr. Britling had kept this trouble well battened down.  He had written to Mrs. Harrowdean a brief ambiguous note saying, “I am thinking over all that you have said,” and after that he had scarcely thought about her at all.  Or at least he had always contrived to be much more vividly thinking about something else.  But now in these night silences the suppressed trouble burst hatches and rose about him.

What a mess he had made of the whole scheme of his emotional life!  There had been a time when he had started out as gaily with his passions and his honour as he had started out with Gladys to go to Market Saffron.  He had as little taste for complications as he had for ditches.  And now his passions and his honour were in a worse case even than poor muddy smashed up Gladys as the cart-horses towed her off, for she at any rate might be repaired.  But he—­he was a terribly patched fabric of explanations now.  Not indeed that he had ever stooped to explanations.  But there he was!  Far away, like a star seen down the length of a tunnel, was that first sad story of a love as clean as starlight.  It had been all over by eight-and-twenty and he could find it in his heart to grieve that he had ever given a thought to love again.  He should have lived a decent widower....  Then Edith had come into his life, Edith that honest and unconscious defaulter.  And there again he should have stuck to his disappointment.  He had stuck to it—­nine days out of every ten.  It’s the tenth day, it’s the odd seductive moment, it’s the instant of confident pride—­and there is your sanguine temperament in the ditch.

He began to recapitulate items in the catalogue of his escapades, and the details of his automobile misadventures mixed themselves up with the story of his heart steering.  For example there was that tremendous Siddons affair.  He had been taking the corner of a girlish friendship and he had taken it altogether too far.  What a frightful mess that had been!  When once one is off the road anything may happen, from a crumpled mud-guard to the car on the top of you.  And there was his forty miles an hour spurt with the great and gifted Delphine Marquise—­for whom he was to have written a play and been a perfect Annunzio.  Until Willersley appeared—­very like the motor-cyclist—­buzzing in the opposite direction.  And then had ensued angers, humiliations....