“You’re certain that no regimen of carefully planned and chosen tonics—­”

“Dismiss the idea.  Dismiss it.”  He decided to take a plunge.  “I’ve just been thinking of a little holiday for myself.  But I’d like to see you through this.  And if I am to see you through, there ought to be some sort of beginning now.  In this three weeks.  Suppose....”

Sir Richmond leapt to his thought.  “I’m free to go anywhere.”

“Golf would drive a man of your composition mad?”

“It would.”

“That’s that.  Still—.  The country must be getting beautiful again now,—­after all the rain we have had.  I have a little two-seater.  I don’t know....  The repair people promise to release it before Friday.”

“But I have a choice of two very comfortable little cars.  Why not be my guest?”

“That might be more convenient.”

“I’d prefer my own car.”

“Then what do you say?”

“I agree.  Peripatetic treatment.”

“South and west.  We could talk on the road.  In the evenings.  By the wayside.  We might make the beginnings of a treatment. ...  A simple tour.  Nothing elaborate.  You wouldn’t bring a man?”

“I always drive myself.”

Section 3

“There’s something very pleasant,” said the doctor, envisaging his own rash proposal, “in travelling along roads you don’t know and seeing houses and parks and villages and towns for which you do not feel in the slightest degree responsible.  They hide all their troubles from the road.  Their backyards are tucked away out of sight, they show a brave face; there’s none of the nasty self-betrayals of the railway approach.  And everything will be fresh still.  There will still be a lot of apple-blossom—­and bluebells....  And all the while we can be getting on with your affair.”

He was back at the window now.  “I want the holiday myself,” he said.

He addressed Sir Richmond over his shoulder.  “Have you noted how fagged and unstable everybody is getting?  Everybody intelligent, I mean.”

“It’s an infernally worrying time.”

“Exactly.  Everybody suffers.”

“It’s no good going on in the old ways—­”

“It isn’t.  And it’s a frightful strain to get into any new ways.  So here we are.

“A man,” the doctor expanded, “isn’t a creature in vacuo.  He’s himself and his world.  He’s a surface of contact, a system of adaptations, between his essential self and his surroundings.  Well, our surroundings have become—­how shall I put it?—­a landslide.  The war which seemed such a definable catastrophe in 1914 was, after all, only the first loud crack and smash of the collapse.  The war is over and—­nothing is over.  This peace is a farce, reconstruction an exploded phrase.  The slide goes on,—­it goes, if anything, faster, without a sign of stopping.  And all our poor little adaptations!  Which we have been elaborating and trusting all our lives!...  One after another they fail us.  We are stripped....  We have to begin all over again....  I’m fifty-seven and I feel at times nowadays like a chicken new hatched in a thunderstorm.”