his purpose too stoutly, had a way of becoming blind to them.  He repudiated inconvenient facts.  He mastered and made his world; Prothero accepted and recorded his.  Benham was a will towards the universe where Prothero was a perception and Amanda a confusing responsive activity.  And it was because of his realization of this profound difference between them that he was possessed by the idea of taking Prothero with him about the world, as a detachable kind of vision—­ rather like that eye the Graiae used to hand one another. . . .

After the busy sunlit streets of Maytime Cambridge, Prothero’s rooms in Trinity, their windows full of Gothic perspectives and light-soaked blue sky, seemed cool and quiet.  A flavour of scholarship pervaded them—­a little blended with the flavour of innumerable breakfasts nearly but not completely forgotten.  Prothero’s door had been locked against the world, and he had appeared after a slight delay looking a little puffy and only apprehending who his visitor was after a resentful stare for the better part of a second.  He might have been asleep, he might have been doing anything but the examination papers he appeared to be doing.  The two men exchanged personal details; they had not met since some months before Benham’ s marriage, and the visitor’s eye went meanwhile from his host to the room and back to his host’s face as though they were all aspects of the thing he was after, the Prothero humour, the earthly touch, the distinctive Prothero flavour.  Then his eye was caught by a large red, incongruous, meretricious-looking volume upon the couch that had an air of having been flung aside, Venus in Gem and marble, its cover proclaimed. . . .

His host followed that glance and blushed.  “They send me all sorts of inappropriate stuff to review,” he remarked.

And then he was denouncing celibacy.

The transition wasn’t very clear to Benham.  His mind had been preoccupied by the problem of how to open his own large project.  Meanwhile Prothero got, as it were, the conversational bit between his teeth and bolted.  He began to say the most shocking things right away, so that Benham’s attention was caught in spite of himself.

“Inflammatory classics.”

“What’s that?”

“Celibacy, my dear Benham, is maddening me,” said Prothero.  “I can’t stand it any longer.”

It seemed to Benham that somewhere, very far away, in another world, such a statement might have been credible.  Even in his own life,—­ it was now indeed a remote, forgotten stage—­there had been something distantly akin. . . .

“You’re going to marry?”

“I must.”

“Who’s the lady, Billy?”

“I don’t know.  Venus.”

His little red-brown eye met his friend’s defiantly.  “So far as I know, it is Venus Anadyomene.”  A flash of laughter passed across his face and left it still angrier, still more indecorously defiant.  “I like her best, anyhow.  I do, indeed.  But, Lord!  I feel that almost any of them—­”