So there was nothing for it in the failure of his mother’s civilities but to increase his own.  He would go down to Harting and take his leave of these amiable outcasts himself.  With a certain effusion.  He would do this soon because he was now within sight of the beginning of his world tour.  He had made his plans and prepared most of his equipment.  Little remained to do but the release of Merkle, the wrappering and locking up of Finacue Street, which could await him indefinitely, and the buying of tickets.  He decided to take the opportunity afforded by a visit of Sir Godfrey and Lady Marayne to the Blights, big iron people in the North of England of so austere a morality that even Benham was ignored by it.  He announced his invasion in a little note to Mrs. Wilder.  He parted from his mother on Friday afternoon; she was already, he perceived, a little reconciled to his project of going abroad; and contrived his arrival at South Harting for that sunset hour which was for his imagination the natural halo of Amanda.

“I’m going round the world,” he told them simply.  “I may be away for two years, and I thought I would like to see you all again before I started.”

That was quite the way they did things.

The supper-party included Mr. Rathbone-Sanders, who displayed a curious tendency to drift in between Benham and Amanda, a literary youth with a Byronic visage, very dark curly hair, and a number of extraordinarily mature chins, a girl-friend of Betty’s who had cycled down from London, and who it appeared maintained herself at large in London by drawing for advertisements, and a silent colourless friend of Mr. Rathbone-Sanders.  The talk lit by Amanda’s enthusiasm circled actively round Benham’s expedition.  It was clear that the idea of giving some years to thinking out one’s possible work in the world was for some reason that remained obscure highly irritating to both Mr. Rathbone-Sanders and the Byronic youth.  Betty too regarded it as levity when there was “so much to be done,” and the topic whacked about and rose to something like a wrangle, and sat down and rested and got up again reinvigorated, with a continuity of interest that Benham had never yet encountered in any London gathering.  He made a good case for his modern version of the Grand Tour, and he gave them something of his intellectual enthusiasm for the distances and views, the cities and seas, the multitudinous wide spectacle of the world he was to experience.  He had been reading about Benares and North China.  As he talked Amanda, who had been animated at first, fell thoughtful and silent.  And then it was discovered that the night was wonderfully warm and the moon shining.  They drifted out into the garden, but Mr. Rathbone-Sanders was suddenly entangled and drawn back by Mrs. Wilder and the young woman from London upon some technical point, and taken to the work-table in the corner of the dining-room to explain.  He was never able to get to the garden.