It was after that that Amanda began to talk about children.  There was nothing involuntary about Amanda.  “Soon,” she said, “we must begin to think of children.  Not just now, but a little later.  It’s good to travel and have our fun, but life is unreal until there are children in the background.  No woman is really content until she is a mother. . . .”  And for nearly a fortnight nothing more was said about that solitary journey round the world.

But children were not the only new topic in Amanda’s talk.  She set herself with an ingenious subtlety to remind her husband that there were other men in the world.  The convenient fags, sometimes a little embarrassed, found their inobtrusive services being brought into the light before Benham’s eyes.  Most of them were much older men than himself, elderly philanderers of whom it seemed to him no sane man need be jealous, men often of forty or more, but one was a contemporary, Sir Philip Easton, a man with a touch of Spanish blood and a suggestion of Spanish fire, who quite manifestly was very much in love with Amanda and of whom she spoke with a slight perceptible difference of manner that made Benham faintly uneasy.  He was ashamed of the feeling.  Easton it seemed was a man of a peculiarly fine honour, so that Amanda could trust herself with him to an extent that would have been inadvisable with men of a commoner substance, and he had a gift of understanding and sympathy that was almost feminine; he could cheer one up when one was lonely and despondent.  For Amanda was so methodical in the arrangement of her time that even in the full rush of a London season she could find an hour now and then for being lonely and despondent.  And he was a liberal and understanding purchaser of the ascendant painters; he understood that side of Amanda’s interests, a side upon which Benham was notably deficient. . . .

“Amanda seems to like that dark boy, Poff; what is his name?—­Sir Philip Easton?” said Lady Marayne.

Benham looked at her with a slightly hostile intelligence, and said nothing.

“When a man takes a wife, he has to keep her,” said Lady Marayne.

“No,” said Benham after consideration.  “I don’t intend to be a wife-herd.”

“What?”

“Wife-herd—­same as goat-herd.”

“Coarse, you are sometimes, Poff—­nowadays.”

“It’s exactly what I mean.  I can understand the kind of curator’s interest an Oriental finds in shepherding a large establishment, but to spend my days looking after one person who ought to be able to look after herself—­”

“She’s very young.”

“She’s quite grown up.  Anyhow I’m not a moral nursemaid.”

“If you leave her about and go abroad—­”

“Has she been talking to you, mother?”

“The thing shows.”

“But about my going abroad?”

“She said something, my little Poff.”

Lady Marayne suddenly perceived that beneath Benham’s indifference was something strung very tight, as though he had been thinking inordinately.  He weighed his words before he spoke again.  “If Amanda chooses to threaten me with a sort of conditional infidelity, I don’t see that it ought to change the plans I have made for my life. . . .”