But the ideas of continence and disregard were unpleasant ideas to Prothero that day.

“Mankind,” said Benham, “is overcharged with this sex.  It suffocates us.  It gives life only to consume it.  We struggle out of the urgent necessities of a mere animal existence.  We are not so much living as being married and given in marriage.  All life is swamped in the love story. . . .”

“Man is only overcharged because he is unsatisfied,” said Prothero, sticking stoutly to his own view.

12

It was only as they sat at a little table in the orchard at Grantchester after their lunch that Benham could make head against Prothero and recover that largeness of outlook which had so easily touched the imagination of Amanda.  And then he did not so much dispose of Prothero’s troubles as soar over them.  It is the last triumph of the human understanding to sympathize with desires we do not share, and to Benham who now believed himself to be loved beyond the chances of life, who was satisfied and tranquil and austerely content, it was impossible that Prothero’s demands should seem anything more than the grotesque and squalid squealings of the beast that has to be overridden and rejected altogether.  It is a freakish fact of our composition that these most intense feelings in life are just those that are most rapidly and completely forgotten; hate one may recall for years, but the magic of love and the flame of desire serve their purpose in our lives and vanish, leaving no trace, like the snows of Venice.  Benham was still not a year and a half from the meretricious delights of Mrs. Skelmersdale, and he looked at Prothero as a marble angel might look at a swine in its sty. . . .

What he had now in mind was an expedition to Russia.  When at last he could sufficiently release Prothero’s attention, he unfolded the project that had been developing steadily in him since his honeymoon experience.

He had discovered a new reason for travelling.  The last country we can see clearly, he had discovered, is our own country.  It is as hard to see one’s own country as it is to see the back of one’s head.  It is too much behind us, too much ourselves.  But Russia is like England with everything larger, more vivid, cruder; one felt that directly one walked about St. Petersburg.  St. Petersburg upon its Neva was like a savage untamed London on a larger Thames; they were seagull-haunted tidal cities, like no other capitals in Europe.  The shipping and buildings mingled in their effects.  Like London it looked over the heads of its own people to a limitless polyglot empire.  And Russia was an aristocratic land, with a middle-class that had no pride in itself as a class; it had a British toughness and incompetence, a British disregard of logic and meticulous care.  Russia, like England, was outside Catholic Christendom, it had a state church and the opposition to that church was not secularism but dissent.  One could draw a score of such contrasted parallels.  And now it was in a state of intolerable stress, that laid bare the elemental facts of a great social organization.  It was having its South African war, its war at the other end of the earth, with a certain defeat instead of a dubious victory. . . .