Mr. Britling Sees It Through by H. G. Wells

Beautiful rounded Corners. … Dear, dear Corners. Cissie Corners. Corners. Could there be a better family?
    H. G. WELLS Massachusetts—but in heaven. …
    Harps playing two-steps, and kind angels wrapped in moonlight.
    Very softly I and you,
    One tum, two tum, three tum, too.
    Off—we—go! …

CHAPTER THE THIRD
THE ENTERTAINMENT OF MR. DIRECK REACHES A CLIMAX
    Â§ 1
    Breakfast was in the open air, and a sunny, easy-going feast. Then the small boys laid hands on Mr. Direck and showed him the pond and the boats, while Mr. Britling strolled about the lawn with Hugh, talking rather intently. And when Mr. Direck returned from the boats in a state of greatly enhanced popularity he found Mr. Britling conversing over his garden railings with what was altogether a new type of Britisher in Mr. Direck’s experience. It was a tall, lean sun-bitten youngish man of forty perhaps, in brown tweeds, looking more like the Englishman of the American illustrations than anything Mr. Direck had met hitherto. Indeed he came very near to a complete realisation of that ideal except that there was a sort of intensity about him, and that his clipped moustache had the restrained stiffness ofa wiry-haired terrier. This gentleman Mr. Direck learned was Colonel Rendezvous. He spoke in clear short sentences, they had an effect of being punched out, and he was refusing to come into the garden and talk.
    â€œHave to do my fourteen miles before lunch,” he said. “You haven’t seen Manning about, have you?”
    â€œHe isn’t here,” said Mr. Britling, and it seemed to Mr. Direck that there was the faintest ambiguity in this reply.
    â€œHave to go alone, then,” said Colonel Rendezvous. “They told me that he had started to come here.”
    â€œI shall motor over to Bramley High Oak for your Boy Scout festival,” said Mr. Britling.
    â€œGoing to have three thousand of ’em,” said the Colonel. “Good show.”
    His steely eyes seemed to search the cover of Mr. Britling’s garden for the missing Manning, and then he decided to give him up. “I must be going,” he said. “So long. Come up!”
    A well-disciplined dog came to heel, and the lean figure had given Mr. Direck a semi-military salutation and gone upon its way. It marched with a long elastic stride; it never looked back.
    â€œManning,” said Mr. Britling, “is probably hiding up in my rose-garden.”
    â€œCuriously enough, I guessed from your manner that that might be the case,” said Mr. Direck.
    â€œYes. Manning is a London journalist. He has a little cottage about a mile over there”—Mr. Britling pointed vaguely—“and he comes down for the weekends. And Rendezvous has found out he isn’t fit. And everybody ought to be fit. That is the beginning and end of life for Rendezvous. Fitness. An almost mineral quality, an insatiable activity of body, great mental simplicity. So he takes possession of poor old Manning and trotshim for that fourteen miles—at four miles an hour. Manning goes through all the agonies of death and damnation, he half dissolves, he pants and drags for the first eight or ten miles, and then I must admit he rather justifies Rendezvous’ theory. He is to be found in the afternoon in a hammock suffering from blistered feet, but otherwise unusually well. But if he can escape it, he does. He hides.”
    â€œBut if he doesn’t want to go with Colonel Rendezvous, why does he?” said Mr. Direck.
    â€œWell, Rendezvous is accustomed to the command of men. And Manning’s only way of refusing things is on printed forms. Which he doesn’t bring down to Matching’s Easy. Ah! behold!”
    Far away across the lawn between two blue cedars there appeared a leisurely form in grey flannels and a loose tie, advancing with manifest circumspection.
    â€œHe’s gone,” cried Britling.
    The leisurely form, obviously