Had every man this sort of crowded catalogue?  Was every forty-five-year-old memory a dark tunnel receding from the star of youth?  It is surely a pity that life cannot end at thirty.  It comes to one clean and in perfect order....

Is experience worth having?

What a clean, straight thing the spirit of youth is.  It is like a bright new spear.  It is like a finely tempered sword.  The figure of his boy took possession of his mind, his boy who looked out on the world with his mother’s, dark eyes, the slender son of that whole-hearted first love.  He was a being at once fine and simple, an intimate mystery.  Must he in his turn get dented and wrinkled and tarnished?

The boy was in trouble.  What was the trouble?

Was it some form of the same trouble that had so tangled and tainted and scarred the private pride of his father?  And how was it possible for Mr. Britling, disfigured by heedless misadventures, embarrassed by complications and concealments, to help this honest youngster out of his perplexities?  He imagined possible forms of these perplexities.  Graceless forms.  Ugly forms.  Such forms as only the nocturnal imagination would have dared present....

Oh, why had he been such a Britling?  Why was he still such a Britling?

Mr. Britling sat up in his bed and beat at the bedclothes with his fists.  He uttered uncompleted vows, “From this hour forth ... from this hour forth....”

He must do something, he felt.  At any rate he had his experiences.  He could warn.  He could explain away.  Perhaps he might help to extricate, if things had got to that pitch.

Should he write to his son?  For a time he revolved a long, tactful letter in his mind.  But that was impossible.  Suppose the trouble was something quite different?  It would have to be a letter in the most general terms....

Section 6

It was in the doubly refracting nature of Mr. Britling’s mind that while he was deploring his inefficiency in regard to his son, he was also deploring the ineffectiveness of all his generation of parents.  Quite insensibly his mind passed over to the generalised point of view.

In his talks with Mr. Direck, Mr. Britling could present England as a great and amiable spectacle of carelessness and relaxation, but was it indeed an amiable spectacle?  The point that Mr. Direck had made about the barn rankled in his thoughts.  His barn was a barn no longer, his farmyard held no cattle; he was just living laxly in the buildings that ancient needs had made, he was living on the accumulated prosperity of former times, the spendthrift heir of toiling generations.  Not only was he a pampered, undisciplined sort of human being; he was living in a pampered, undisciplined sort of community.  The two things went together....  This confounded Irish business, one could laugh at it in the daylight, but was it indeed a thing to laugh