He left the topic at that.

Dr. Martineau said something of no consequence about its being a very comfortable little car.

Somewhere between Brentford and Hounslow, Sir Richmond plunged into the matter between them.  “I don’t know how deep we are going into these psychological probings of yours,” he said.  “But I doubt very much if we shall get anything out of them.”

“Probably not,” said Dr. Martineau.

“After all, what I want is a tonic.  I don’t see that there is anything positively wrong with me.  A certain lack of energy—­”

“Lack of balance,” corrected the doctor.  “You are wasting energy upon internal friction.”

“But isn’t that inevitable?  No machine is perfectly efficient.  No man either.  There is always a waste.  Waste of the type; waste of the individual idiosyncrasy.  This little car, for instance, isn’t pulling as she ought to pull—­she never does.  She’s low in her class.  So with myself; there is a natural and necessary high rate of energy waste.  Moods of apathy and indolence are natural to me. (Damn that omnibus!  All over the road!)”

“We don’t deny the imperfection—­” began the doctor.

“One has to fit oneself to one’s circumstances,” said Sir Richmond, opening up another line of thought.

“We don’t deny the imperfection” the doctor stuck to it.  “These new methods of treatment are based on the idea of imperfection.  We begin with that.  I began with that last Tuesday....”

Sir Richmond, too, was sticking to his argument.  “A man, and for that matter the world he lives in, is a tangle of accumulations.  Your psychoanalyst starts, it seems to me, with a notion of stripping down to something fundamental.  The ape before was a tangle of accumulations, just as we are.  So it was with his forebears.  So it has always been.  All life is an endless tangle of accumulations.”

“Recognize it,” said the doctor.

“And then?” said Sir Richmond, controversially.

“Recognize in particular your own tangle.”

“Is my particular tangle very different from the general tangle? (Oh!  Damn this feeble little engine!) I am a creature of undecided will, urged on by my tangled heredity to do a score of entirely incompatible things.  Mankind, all life, is that.”

“But our concern is the particular score of incompatible things you are urged to do.  We examine and weigh—­we weigh—­”

The doctor was still saying these words when a violent and ultimately disastrous struggle began between Sir Richmond and the little Charmeuse car.  The doctor stopped in mid-sentence.