So Mr. Britling trod the path of his eighth digression, rather overworked in the matter of flowers and the selection of small jewellery, stalked by the invisible and indefatigable Oliver, haunted into an unwilling industry of attentions—­attentions on the model of the professional lover of the French novels—­by the memory and expectation of tearful scenes.  “Then you don’t love me!  And it’s all spoilt.  I’ve risked talk and my reputation....  I was a fool ever to dream of making love beautifully....”

Exactly like running your car into a soft wet ditch when you cannot get out and you cannot get on.  And your work and your interests waiting and waiting for you!...

The car itself was an outcome of the affair.  It was Mrs. Harrowdean’s idea, she thought chiefly of pleasant expeditions to friendly inns in remote parts of the country, inns with a flavour of tacit complicity, but it fell in very pleasantly with Mr. Britling’s private resentment at the extraordinary inconvenience of the railway communications between Matching’s Easy and her station at Pyecrafts, which involved a journey to Liverpool Street and a long wait at a junction.  And now the car was smashed up—­just when he had acquired skill enough to take it over to Pyecrafts without shame, and on Tuesday or Wednesday at latest he would have to depart in the old way by the London train....

Only the most superficial mind would assert nowadays that man is a reasonable creature.  Man is an unreasonable creature, and it was entirely unreasonable and human for Mr. Britling during his nocturnal self-reproaches to mix up his secret resentment at his infatuation for Mrs. Harrowdean with his ill-advised attack upon the wall of Brandismead Park.  He ought never to have bought that car; he ought never to have been so ready to meet Mrs. Harrowdean more than halfway.

What exacerbated his feeling about Mrs. Harrowdean was a new line she had recently taken with regard to Mrs. Britling.  From her first rash assumption that Mr. Britling was indifferent to his wife, she had come to realise that on the contrary he was in some ways extremely tender about his wife.  This struck her as an outrageous disloyalty.  Instead of appreciating a paradox she resented an infidelity.  She smouldered with perplexed resentment for some days, and then astonished her lover by a series of dissertations of a hostile and devastating nature upon the lady of the Dower House.

He tried to imagine he hadn’t heard all that he had heard, but Mrs. Harrowdean had a nimble pen and nimbler afterthoughts, and once her mind had got to work upon the topic she developed her offensive in half-a-dozen brilliant letters....  On the other hand she professed a steadily increasing passion for Mr. Britling.  And to profess passion for Mr. Britling was to put him under a sense of profound obligation—­because indeed he was a modest man.  He found himself in an emotional quandary.