He was indeed making elaborate explanations.  He said that what he wanted to do was to understand “the collective life of the world,” and that this was not to be done in a West-End study.  He had an extraordinary contempt, it seemed, for both sides in the drama of British politics.  He had extravagant ideas of beginning in some much more fundamental way.  He wanted to understand this “collective life of the world,” because ultimately he wanted to help control it.  (Was there ever such nonsense?) The practical side of this was serious enough, however; he was back at his old idea of going round the earth.  Later on that might be rather a jolly thing to do, but not until they had struck root a little more surely in London.

And then with amazement, with incredulity, with indignation, she began to realize that he was proposing to go off by himself upon this vague extravagant research, that all this work she had been doing to make a social place for him in London was as nothing to him, that he was thinking of himself as separable from her. . . .

“But, Cheetah!  How can you leave your spotless leopard?  You would howl in the lonely jungle!”

“Possibly I shall.  But I am going.”

“Then I shall come.”

“No.”  He considered her reasons.  “You see you are not interested.”

“But I am.”

“Not as I am.  You would turn it all into a jolly holiday.  You don’t want to see things as I want to do.  You want romance.  All the world is a show for you.  As a show I can’t endure it.  I want to lay hands on it.”

“But, Cheetah!” she said, “this is separation.”

“You will have your life here.  And I shall come back.”

“But, Cheetah!  How can we be separated?”

“We are separated,” he said.

Her eyes became round with astonishment.  Then her face puckered.

“Cheetah!” she cried in a voice of soft distress, “I love you.  What do you mean?”

And she staggered forward, tear-blinded, and felt for his neck and shoulders, so that she might weep in his arms. . . .

5

“Don’t say we are separated,” she whispered, putting her still wet face close to his.

“No.  We’re mates,” he answered softly, with his arm about her.

“How could we ever keep away from each uvver?” she whispered.

He was silent.

“How could we?”

He answered aloud.  “Amanda,” he said, “I mean to go round the world.”

She disentangled herself from his arm and sat up beside him.

“What is to become of me,” she asked suddenly in a voice of despair, “while you go round the world?  If you desert me in London,” she said, “if you shame me by deserting me in London—­ If you leave me, I will never forgive you, Cheetah!  Never.”  Then in an almost breathless voice, and as if she spoke to herself, “Never in all my days.”

6