The sorrows of the sanguine temperament are brief but furious; the world knows little of them.  The world has no need to reckon with them.  They cause no suicides and few crimes.  They hurry past, smiting at their victim as they go.  None the less they are misery.  Mr. Britling in these moods did not perhaps experience the grey and hopeless desolations of the melancholic nor the red damnation of the choleric, but he saw a world that bristled with misfortune and error, with poisonous thorns and traps and swampy places and incurable blunderings.  An almost insupportable remorse for being Mr. Britling would pursue him—­justifying itself upon a hundred counts....

And for being such a Britling!...

Why—­he revived again that bitter question of a thousand and one unhappy nights—­why was he such a fool?  Such a hasty fool?  Why couldn’t he look before he leapt?  Why did he take risks?  Why was he always so ready to act upon the supposition that all was bound to go well? (He might as well have asked why he had quick brown eyes.)

Why, for instance, hadn’t he adhered to the resolution of the early morning?  He had begun with an extremity of caution....

It was a characteristic of these moods of Mr. Britling that they produced a physical restlessness.  He kept on turning over and then turning over again, and sitting up and lying back, like a martyr on a gridiron....

This was just the latest instance of a life-long trouble.  Will there ever be a sort of man whose thoughts are quick and his acts slow?  Then indeed we shall have a formidable being.  Mr. Britling’s thoughts were quick and sanguine and his actions even more eager than his thoughts.  Already while he was a young man Mr. Britling had found his acts elbow their way through the hurry of his ideas and precipitate humiliations.  Long before his reasons were marshalled, his resolutions were formed.  He had attempted a thousand remonstrances with himself; he had sought to remedy the defects in his own character by written inscriptions in his bedroom and memoranda inside his watch case.  “Keep steady!” was one of them.  “Keep the End in View.”  And, “Go steadfastly, coherently, continuously; only so can you go where you will.”  In distrusting all impulse, scrutinising all imagination, he was persuaded lay his one prospect of escape from the surprise of countless miseries.  Otherwise he danced among glass bombs and barbed wire.

There had been a time when he could exhort himself to such fundamental charge and go through phases of the severest discipline.  Always at last to be taken by surprise from some unexpected quarter.  At last he had ceased to hope for any triumph so radical.  He had been content to believe that in recent years age and a gathering habit of wisdom had somewhat slowed his leaping purpose.  That if he hadn’t overcome he had at least to a certain extent minimised it.  But this last folly was surely the worst.  To charge through this patient world with—­how much did the car weigh?  A ton certainly and perhaps more—­reckless of every risk.  Not only to himself but others.  At this thought, he clutched the steering wheel again.  Once more he saw the bent back of the endangered cyclist, once more he felt rather than saw the seething approach of the motor bicycle, and then through a long instant he drove helplessly at the wall....