And at Dower House they went about their businesses.  Mr. Direck’s arm healed rapidly; Cecily Corner and he talked of their objects in life and Utopias and the books of Mr. Britling, and he got down from a London bookseller Baedeker’s guides for Holland and Belgium, South Germany and Italy; Herr Heinrich after some doubt sent in his application form and his preliminary deposit for the Esperanto Conference at Boulogne, and Billy consented to be stroked three times but continued to bite with great vigour and promptitude.  And the trouble about Hugh, Mr. Britling’s eldest son, resolved itself into nothing of any vital importance, and settled itself very easily.

Section 5

After Hugh had cleared things up and gone back to London Mr. Britling was inclined to think that such a thing as apprehension was a sin against the general fairness and integrity of life.

Of all things in the world Hugh was the one that could most easily rouse Mr. Britling’s unhappy aptitude for distressing imaginations.  Hugh was nearer by far to his heart and nerves than any other creature.  In the last few years Mr. Britling, by the light of a variety of emotional excursions in other directions, had been discovering this.  Whatever Mr. Britling discovered he talked about; he had evolved from his realisation of this tenderness, which was without an effort so much tenderer than all the subtle and tremendous feelings he had attempted in his—­excursions, the theory that he had expounded to Mr. Direck that it is only through our children that we are able to achieve disinterested love, real love.  But that left unexplained that far more intimate emotional hold of Hugh than of his very jolly little step-brothers.  That was a fact into which Mr. Britling rather sedulously wouldn’t look....

Mr. Britling was probably much franker and more open-eyed with himself and the universe than a great number of intelligent people, and yet there were quite a number of aspects of his relations with his wife, with people about him, with his country and God and the nature of things, upon which he turned his back with an attentive persistence.  But a back too resolutely turned may be as indicative as a pointing finger, and in this retrogressive way, and tacitly even so far as his formal thoughts, his unspoken comments, went, Mr. Britling knew that he loved his son because he had lavished the most hope and the most imagination upon him, because he was the one living continuation of that dear life with Mary, so lovingly stormy at the time, so fine now in memory, that had really possessed the whole heart of Mr. Britling.  The boy had been the joy and marvel of the young parents; it was incredible to them that there had ever been a creature so delicate and sweet, and they brought considerable imagination and humour to the detailed study of his minute personality and to the forecasting of his future.  Mr. Britling’s