Amanda had come back to England in a state of extravagantly vigorous womanhood.  Benham’s illness, though it lasted only two or three weeks, gave her a sense of power and leadership for which she had been struggling instinctively ever since they came together.  For a time at Locarno he was lax-minded and indolent, and in that time she formed her bright and limited plans for London.  Benham had no plans as yet but only a sense of divergence, as though he was being pulled in opposite directions by two irresistible forces.  To her it was plain that he needed occupation, some distinguished occupation, and she could imagine nothing better for him than a political career.  She perceived he had personality, that he stood out among men so that his very silences were effective.  She loved him immensely, and she had tremendous ambitions for him and through him.

And also London, the very thought of London, filled her with appetite.  Her soul thirsted for London.  It was like some enormous juicy fruit waiting for her pretty white teeth, a place almost large enough to give her avidity the sense of enough.  She felt it waiting for her, household, servants, a carriage, shops and the jolly delight of buying and possessing things, the opera, first-nights, picture exhibitions, great dinner-parties, brilliant lunch parties, crowds seen from a point of vantage, the carriage in a long string of fine carriages with the lamplit multitude peering, Amanda in a thousand bright settings, in a thousand various dresses.  She had had love; it had been glorious, it was still glorious, but her love-making became now at times almost perfunctory in the contemplation of these approaching delights and splendours and excitements.

She knew, indeed, that ideas were at work in Benham’s head; but she was a realist.  She did not see why ideas should stand in the way of a career.  Ideas are a brightness, the good looks of the mind.  One talks ideas, but the thing that is, is the thing that is.  And though she believed that Benham had a certain strength of character of his own, she had that sort of confidence in his love for her and in the power of her endearments that has in it the assurance of a faint contempt.  She had mingled pride and sense in the glorious realization of the power over him that her wit and beauty gave her.  She had held him faint with her divinity, intoxicated with the pride of her complete possession, and she did not dream that the moment when he should see clearly that she could deliberately use these ultimate delights to rule and influence him, would be the end of their splendour and her power.  Her nature, which was just a nest of vigorous appetites, was incapable of suspecting his gathering disillusionment until it burst upon her.

Now with her attention set upon London ahead he could observe her.  In the beginning he had never seemed to be observing her at all, they dazzled one another; it seemed extraordinary now to him to note how much he had been able to disregard.  There were countless times still when he would have dropped his observation and resumed that mutual exaltation very gladly, but always now other things possessed her mind. . . .