Her phrases were vivid.  She quoted the very words of Amanda, words she had overheard at Chexington in the twilight.  They were no invention.  They were the very essence of Amanda, the lover.  It was as sure as if Benham had heard the sound of her voice, as if he had peeped and seen, as if she had crept by him, stooping and rustling softly.  It brought back the living sense of her, excited, flushed, reckless; his wild-haired Amanda of infinite delight. . . .  All day those words of hers pursued him.  All night they flared across the black universe.  He buried his face in the pillows and they whispered softly in his ear.

He walked his room in the darkness longing to smash and tear.

He went out from the house and shook his ineffectual fists at the stirring quiet of the stars.

He sent no notice of his coming back.  Nor did he come back with a definite plan.  But he wanted to get at Amanda.

26

It was with Amanda he had to reckon.  Towards Easton he felt scarcely any anger at all.  Easton he felt only existed for him because Amanda willed to have it so.

Such anger as Easton did arouse in him was a contemptuous anger.  His devotion filled Benham with scorn.  His determination to serve Amanda at any price, to bear the grossest humiliations and slights for her, his humility, his service and tenderness, his care for her moods and happiness, seemed to Benham a treachery to human nobility.  That rage against Easton was like the rage of a trade-unionist against a blackleg.  Are all the women to fall to the men who will be their master-slaves and keepers?  But it was not simply that Benham felt men must be freed from this incessant attendance; women too must free themselves from their almost instinctive demand for an attendant. . . .

His innate disposition was to treat women as responsible beings.  Never in his life had he thought of a woman as a pretty thing to be fooled and won and competed for and fought over.  So that it was Amanda he wanted to reach and reckon with now, Amanda who had mated and ruled his senses only to fling him into this intolerable pit of shame and jealous fury.  But the forces that were driving him home now were the forces below the level of reason and ideas, organic forces compounded of hate and desire, profound aboriginal urgencies.  He thought, indeed, very little as he lay in his berth or sulked on deck; his mind lay waste under a pitiless invasion of exasperating images that ever and again would so wring him that his muscles would tighten and his hands clench or he would find himself restraining a snarl, the threat of the beast, in his throat.

Amanda grew upon his imagination until she overshadowed the whole world.  She filled the skies.  She bent over him and mocked him.  She became a mystery of passion and dark beauty.  She was the sin of the world.  One breathed her in the winds of the sea.  She had taken to herself the greatness of elemental things. . . .