Pyecrafts was like a crystal casket of finer soil withdrawn from the tarred highways of the earth....

And yet the very next day this angel enemy of controversies broke out in the most abominable way about Edith, and he had to tell her more plainly than he had done hitherto, that he could not tolerate that sort of thing.  He wouldn’t have Edith guyed.  He wouldn’t have Edith made to seem base.  And at that there was much trouble between them, and tears and talk of Oliver....

Mr. Britling found himself unable to get on either with “The Silent Places” or the pamphlet, and he was very unhappy....

Afterwards she repented very touchingly, and said that if only he would love her she would swallow a thousand Ediths.  He waived a certain disrespect in the idea of her swallowing Edith, and they had a beautiful reconciliation and talked of exalted things, and in the evening he worked quite well upon “The Silent Places” and thought of half-a-dozen quite wonderful lines, and in the course of the next day he returned to Dower House and Mr. Direck and considerable piles of correspondence and the completion of the Irish pamphlet.

But he was restless.  He was more restless in his house than he had ever been.  He could not understand it.  Everything about him was just as it had always been, and yet it was unsatisfactory, and it seemed more unstable than anything had ever seemed before.  He was bored by the solemn development of the Irish dispute; he was irritated by the smouldering threat of the Balkans; he was irritated by the suffragettes and by a string of irrational little strikes; by the general absence of any main plot as it were to hold all these wranglings and trivialities together....  At the Dower House the most unpleasant thoughts would come to him.  He even had doubts whether in “The Silent Places,” he had been plagiarising, more or less unconsciously, from Henry James’s “Great Good Place."...

On the twenty-first of July Gladys came back repaired and looking none the worse for her misadventure.  Next day he drove her very carefully over to Pyecrafts, hoping to drug his uneasiness with the pretence of a grand passion and the praises of “The Silent Places,” that beautiful work of art that was so free from any taint of application, and alas! he found Mrs. Harrowdean in an evil mood.  He had been away from her for ten days—­ten whole days.  No doubt Edith had manoeuvred to keep him.  She hadn’t! Hadn’t she?  How was he, poor simple soul! to tell that she hadn’t?  That was the prelude to a stormy afternoon.

The burthen of Mrs. Harrowdean was that she was wasting her life, that she was wasting the poor, good, patient Oliver’s life, that for the sake of friendship she was braving the worst imputations and that he treated her cavalierly, came when he wished to do so, stayed away heartlessly, never thought she needed little treats, little attentions, little presents.  Did he think she could settle down to her poor work, such as it was, in neglect and loneliness?  He forgot women were dear little tender things, and had to be made happy and kept happy.  Oliver might not be clever and attractive but he did at least in his clumsy way understand and try and do his duty....