“I don’t want to kill you.”

Her eyes dilated.  “Beat me.”

“And I haven’t the remotest intention of making love to you,” he said, and pushed her soft face and hands away from him as if he would stand up.

She caught hold of him again.  “Stay with me,” she said.

He made no effort to shake off her grip.  He looked at the dark cloud of her hair that had ruled him so magically, and the memory of old delights made him grip a great handful almost inadvertently as he spoke.  “Dear Leopard,” he said, “we humans are the most streaky of conceivable things.  I thought I hated you.  I do.  I hate you like poison.  And also I do not hate you at all.”

Then abruptly he was standing over her.

She rose to her knees.

“Stay here, old Cheetah!” she said.  “This is your house.  I am your wife.”

He went towards the unfastened front door.

“Cheetah!” she cried with a note of despair.

He halted at the door.

“Amanda, I will come to-morrow.  I will come in the morning, in the sober London daylight, and then we will settle things.”

He stared at her, and to her amazement he smiled.  He spoke as one who remarks upon a quite unexpected fact. . . .

“Never in my life, Amanda, have I seen a human being that I wanted so little to kill.”

29

White found a fragment that might have been written within a week of those last encounters of Benham and Amanda.

“The thing that astonished me most in Amanda was the change in her mental quality.

“With me in the old days she had always been a sincere person; she had deceived me about facts, but she had never deceived me about herself.  Her personal, stark frankness had been her essential strength.  And it was gone.  I came back to find Amanda an accomplished actress, a thing of poses and calculated effects.  She was a surface, a sham, a Lorelei.  Beneath that surface I could not discover anything individual at all.  Fear and a grasping quality, such as God gave us all when he gave us hands; but the individual I knew, the humorous wilful Spotless Leopard was gone.  Whither, I cannot imagine.  An amazing disappearance.  Clean out of space and time like a soul lost for ever.

“When I went to see her in the morning, she was made up for a scene, she acted an intricate part, never for a moment was she there in reality. . . .

“I have got a remarkable persuasion that she lost herself in this way, by cheapening love, by making base love to a lover she despised. . . .  There can be no inequality in love.  Give and take must balance.  One must be one’s natural self or the whole business is an indecent trick, a vile use of life!  To use inferiors in love one must needs talk down to them, interpret oneself in their insufficient phrases, pretend, sentimentalize.  And it is clear that unless oneself is to be lost,