Benham felt it was very kind of him to take so intimate an interest in these matters, but on the spur of the moment he could find no better expression for this than a grunt.

“You don’t mind,” said the young man with a slight catch in the breath that might have been apprehensive, “that I sometimes bring her books and flowers and things?  Do what little I can to keep life interesting down here?  It’s not very congenial. . . .  She’s so wonderful—­I think she is the most wonderful woman in the world.”

Benham perceived that so far from being a modern aristocrat he was really a primitive barbarian in these matters.

“I’ve no doubt,” he said, “that my wife has every reason to be grateful for your attentions.”

In the little pause that followed Benham had a feeling that Sir Philip was engendering something still more personal.  If so, he might be constrained to invert very gently but very firmly the bowl of chrysanthemums over Sir Philip’s head, or kick him in an improving manner.  He had a ridiculous belief that Sir Philip would probably take anything of the sort very touchingly.  He scrambled in his mind for some remark that would avert this possibility.

“Have you ever been in Russia?” he asked hastily.  “It is the most wonderful country in Europe.  I had an odd adventure near Kiev.  During a pogrom.”

And he drowned the developing situation in a flood of description. . . .

But it was not so easy to drown the little things that were presently thrown out by Lady Marayne.  They were so much more in the air. . . .

18

Sir Philip suddenly got out of the picture even as Benham had foreseen.

“Easton has gone away,” he remarked three days later to Amanda.

“I told him to go.  He is a bore with you about.  But otherwise he is rather a comfort, Cheetah.”  She meditated upon Sir Philip.  “And he’s an honourable man,” she said.  “He’s safe. . . .”

19

After that visit it was that the notes upon love and sex began in earnest.  The scattered memoranda upon the perfectness of heroic love for the modern aristocrat ended abruptly.  Instead there came the first draft for a study of jealousy.  The note was written in pencil on Chexington notepaper and manifestly that had been supported on the ribbed cover of a book.  There was a little computation in the corner, converting forty-five degrees Reaumur into degrees Fahrenheit, which made White guess it had been written in the Red Sea.  But, indeed, it had been written in a rather amateurishly stoked corridor-train on Benham’s journey to the gathering revolt in Moscow. . . .

“I think I have been disposed to underrate the force of sexual jealousy. . . .  I thought it was something essentially contemptible, something that one dismissed and put behind oneself in the mere effort to be aristocratic, but I begin to realize that it is not quite so easily settled with. . . .