“Lack of balance,” corrected the doctor. “You are wasting energy upon internal friction.”
“But isn’t that inevitable? No machine is perfectly efficient. No man either. There is always a waste. Waste of the type; waste of the individual idiosyncrasy. This little car, for instance, isn’t pulling as she ought to pull—she never does. She’s low in her class. So with myself; there is a natural and necessary high rate of energy waste. Moods of apathy and indolence are natural to me. (Damn that omnibus! All over the road!)”
“We don’t deny the imperfection——” began the doctor.
“One has to fit oneself to one’s circumstances,” said Sir Richmond, opening up another line of thought.
“We don’t deny the imperfection” the doctor stuck to it. “These new methods of treatment are based on the idea of imperfection. We begin with that. I began with that last Tuesday....”
Sir Richmond, too, was sticking to his argument. “A man, and for that matter the world he lives in, is a tangle of accumulations. Your psychoanalyst starts, it seems to me, with a notion of stripping down to something fundamental. The ape before was a tangle of accumulations, just as we are. So it was with his forebears. So it has always been. All life is an endless tangle of accumulations.”
