He was seeing more and more clearly that all civilization was an effort, and so far always an inadequate and very partially successful effort.  Always it had been aristocratic, aristocratic in the sense that it was the work of minorities, who took power, who had a common resolution against the inertia, the indifference, the insubordination and instinctive hostility of the mass of mankind.  And always the set-backs, the disasters of civilization, had been failures of the aristocratic spirit.  Why had the Roman purpose faltered and shrivelled?  Every order, every brotherhood, every organization carried with it the seeds of its own destruction.  Must the idea of statecraft and rule perpetually reappear, reclothe itself in new forms, age, die, even as life does—­making each time its almost infinitesimal addition to human achievement?  Now the world is crying aloud for a renascence of the spirit that orders and controls.  Human affairs sway at a dizzy height of opportunity.  Will they keep their footing there, or stagger?  We have got back at last to a time as big with opportunity as the early empire.  Given only the will in men and it would be possible now to turn the dazzling accidents of science, the chancy attainments of the nineteenth century, into a sane and permanent possession, a new starting point. . . .  What a magnificence might be made of life!

He was aroused by Amanda’s voice.

“When we go back to London, old Cheetah,” she said, “we must take a house.”

For some moments he stared at her, trying to get back to their point of divergence.

“Why?” he asked at length.

“We must have a house,” she said.

He looked at her face.  Her expression was profoundly thoughtful, her eyes were fixed on the slumbering ships poised upon the transparent water under the mountain shadows.

“You see,” she thought it out, “you’ve got to tell in London.  You can’t just sneak back there.  You’ve got to strike a note of your own.  With all these things of yours.”

“But how?”

“There’s a sort of little house, I used to see them when I was a girl and my father lived in London, about Brook Street and that part.  Not too far north. . . .  You see going back to London for us is just another adventure.  We’ve got to capture London.  We’ve got to scale it.  We’ve got advantages of all sorts.  But at present we’re outside.  We’ve got to march in.”

Her clear hazel eyes contemplated conflicts and triumphs.

She was roused by Benham’s voice.

“What the deuce are you thinking of, Amanda?”

She turned her level eyes to his.  “London,” she said.  “For you.”

“I don’t want London,” he said.

“I thought you did.  You ought to.  I do.”

“But to take a house!  Make an invasion of London!”

“You dear old Cheetah, you can’t be always frisking about in the wilderness, staring at the stars.”