At first Amanda knew nobody in London, except a few people in the Hampstead Garden suburb that she had not the slightest wish to know, and then very quickly she seemed to know quite a lot of people.  The artistic circle brought in people, Lady Marayne brought in people; they spread.  It was manifest the Benhams were a very bright young couple; he would certainly do something considerable presently, and she was bright and daring, jolly to look at and excellent fun, and, when you came to talk to her, astonishingly well informed.  They passed from one hostess’s hand to another:  they reciprocated.  The Clynes people and the Rushtones took her up; Mr. Evesham was amused by her, Lady Beach Mandarin proclaimed her charm like a trumpet, the Young Liberal people made jealous advances, Lord Moggeridge found she listened well, she lit one of the brightest weekend parties Lady Marayne had ever gathered at Chexington.  And her descriptions of recent danger and adventure in Albania not only entertained her hearers but gave her just that flavour of personal courage which completes the fascination of a young woman.  People in the gaps of a halting dinner-table conversation would ask:  “Have you met Mrs. Benham?”

Meanwhile Benham appeared to be talking.  A smiling and successful young woman, who a year ago had been nothing more than a leggy girl with a good lot of miscellaneous reading in her head, and vaguely engaged, or at least friendly to the pitch of engagement, to Mr. Rathbone-Sanders, may be forgiven if in the full tide of her success she does not altogether grasp the intention of her husband’s discourse.  It seemed to her that he was obsessed by a responsibility for civilization and the idea that he was aristocratic. (Secretly she was inclined to doubt whether he was justified in calling himself aristocratic; at the best his mother was county-stuff; but still if he did there was no great harm in it nowadays.) Clearly his line was Tory-Democracy, social reform through the House of Lords and friendly intimacy with the more spirited young peers.  And it was only very slowly and reluctantly that she was forced to abandon this satisfactory solution of his problem.  She reproduced all the equipment and comforts of his Finacue Street study in their new home, she declared constantly that she would rather forego any old social thing than interfere with his work, she never made him go anywhere with her without first asking if his work permitted it.  To relieve him of the burthen of such social attentions she even made a fag or so.  The making of fags out of manifestly stricken men, the keeping of tamed and hopeless admirers, seemed to her to be the most natural and reasonable of feminine privileges.  They did their useful little services until it pleased the Lord Cheetah to come to his own.  That was how she put it. . . .

But at last he was talking to her in tones that could no longer be ignored.  He was manifestly losing his temper with her.  There was a novel austerity in his voice and a peculiar whiteness about his face on certain occasions that lingered in her memory.