7

“No aristocrat has any right to be jealous,” Benham wrote.  “If he chances to be mated with a woman who does not see his vision or naturally go his way, he has no right to expect her, much less to compel her to go his way.  What is the use of dragging an unwilling companion through morasses of uncongenial thought to unsought ends?  What is the use of dragging even a willing pretender, who has no inherent will to seek and live the aristocratic life?

“But that does not excuse him from obedience to his own call. . . .”

He wrote that very early in his examination of the Third Limitation.  Already he had thought out and judged Amanda.  The very charm of her, the sweetness, the nearness and magic of her, was making him more grimly resolute to break away.  All the elaborate process of thinking her over had gone on behind the mask of his silences while she had been preoccupied with her housing and establishment in London; it was with a sense of extraordinary injustice, of having had a march stolen upon her, of being unfairly trapped, that Amanda found herself faced by foregone conclusions.  He was ready now even with the details of his project.  She should go on with her life in London exactly as she had planned it.  He would take fifteen hundred a year for himself and all the rest she might spend without check or stint as it pleased her.  He was going round the world for one or two years.  It was even possible he would not go alone.  There was a man at Cambridge he might persuade to come with him, a don called Prothero who was peculiarly useful in helping him to hammer out his ideas. . . .

To her it became commandingly necessary that none of these things should happen.

She tried to play upon his jealousy, but her quick instinct speedily told her that this only hardened his heart.  She perceived that she must make a softer appeal.  Now of a set intention she began to revive and imitate the spontaneous passion of the honeymoon; she perceived for the first time clearly how wise and righteous a thing it is for a woman to bear a child.  “He cannot go if I am going to have a child,” she told herself.  But that would mean illness, and for illness in herself or others Amanda had the intense disgust natural to her youth.  Yet even illness would be better than this intolerable publication of her husband’s ability to leave her side. . . .

She had a wonderful facility of enthusiasm and she set herself forthwith to cultivate a philoprogenitive ambition, to communicate it to him.  Her dread of illness disappeared; her desire for offspring grew.

“Yes,” he said, “I want to have children, but I must go round the world none the less.”

She argued with all the concentrated subtlety of her fine keen mind.  She argued with persistence and repetition.  And then suddenly so that she was astonished at herself, there came a moment when she ceased to argue.