There were so many Amandas, they were as innumerable as the Venuses—­ Cytherea, Cypria, Paphia, Popularia, Euploea, Area, Verticordia, Etaira, Basilea, Myrtea, Libertina, Freya, Astarte, Philommedis, Telessigamma, Anadyomene, and a thousand others to whom men have bowed and built temples, a thousand and the same, and yet it seemed to Benham there was still one wanting.

The Amanda he had loved most wonderfully was that Amanda in armour who had walked with him through the wilderness of the world along the road to Chichester—­and that Amanda came back to him no more.

5

Amanda too was making her observations and discoveries.

These moods of his perplexed her; she was astonished to find he was becoming irritable; she felt that he needed a firm but gentle discipline in his deportment as a lover.  At first he had been perfect. . . .

But Amanda was more prepared for human inconsecutiveness than Benham, because she herself was inconsecutive, and her dissatisfaction with his irritations and preoccupation broadened to no general discontent.  He had seemed perfect and he wasn’t.  So nothing was perfect.  And he had to be managed, just as one must manage a dog or a cousin or a mother or a horse.  Anyhow she had got him, she had no doubt that she held him by a thousand ties, the spotless leopard had him between her teeth, he was a prisoner in the dusk of her hair, and the world was all one vast promise of entertainment.

6

But the raid into the Balkans was not the tremendous success she had expected it to be.  They had adventures, but they were not the richly coloured, mediaeval affairs she had anticipated.  For the most part until Benham broke loose beyond Ochrida they were adventures in discomfort.  In those remote parts of Europe inns die away and cease, and it had never occurred to Amanda that inns could die away anywhere.  She had thought that they just became very simple and natural and quaint.  And she had thought that when benighted people knocked at a door it would presently open hospitably.  She had not expected shots at random from the window.  And it is not usual in Albania generally for women, whether they are Christian or Moslem, to go about unveiled; when they do so it leads to singular manifestations.  The moral sense of the men is shocked and staggered, and they show it in many homely ways.  Small boys at that age when feminine beauty does not yet prevail with them, pelt.  Also in Mahometan districts they pelt men who do not wear fezzes, while occasionally Christians of the shawl-headed or skull-cap persuasions will pelt a fez.  Sketching is always a peltable or mobable offence, as being contrary to the Koran, and sitting down tempts the pelter.  Generally they pelt.  The dogs of Albania are numerous, big, dirty, white dogs, large and hostile, and they attack with little hesitation.  The women of Albania are secluded and remote, and indisposed to