“All this affair here is little more than a hitch in the machinery,” said Benham, and went back to his large preoccupation. . . .

But White, who had not seen so much human disorder as Benham, felt that it was more than that.  Always he kept the tail of his eye upon that eventful background while Benham talked to him.

When the firearms went off he may for the moment have even given the background the greater share of his attention. . . .

11

It was only as White burrowed through his legacy of documents that the full values came to very many things that Benham said during these last conversations.  The papers fitted in with his memories of their long talks like text with commentary; so much of Benham’s talk had repeated the private writings in which he had first digested his ideas that it was presently almost impossible to disentangle what had been said and understood at Johannesburg from the fuller statement of those patched and corrected manuscripts.  The two things merged in White’s mind as he read.  The written text took upon itself a resonance of Benham’s voice; it eked out the hints and broken sentences of his remembered conversation.

But some things that Benham did not talk about at all, left by their mere marked absence an impression on White’s mind.  And occasionally after Benham had been talking for a long time there would be an occasional aphasia, such as is often apparent in the speech of men who restrain themselves from betraying a preoccupation.  He would say nothing about Amanda or about women in general, he was reluctant to speak of Prothero, and another peculiarity was that he referred perhaps half a dozen times or more to the idea that he was a “prig.”  He seemed to be defending himself against some inner accusation, some unconquerable doubt of the entire adventure of his life.  These half hints and hints by omission exercised the quick intuitions of White’s mind very keenly, and he drew far closer to an understanding of Benham’s reserves than Benham ever suspected. . . .

At first after his parting from Amanda in London Benham had felt completely justified in his treatment of her.  She had betrayed him and he had behaved, he felt, with dignity and self-control.  He had no doubt that he had punished her very effectively, and it was only after he had been travelling in China with Prothero for some time and in the light of one or two chance phrases in her letters that he began to have doubts whether he ought to have punished her at all.  And one night at Shanghai he had a dream in which she stood before him, dishevelled and tearful, his Amanda, very intensely his Amanda, and said that she was dirty and shameful and spoilt for ever, because he had gone away from her.  Afterwards the dream became absurd:  she showed him the black leopard’s fur as though it was a rug, and it was now moth-eaten and mangey, the leopard skin that had been so bright and wonderful such a little time ago, and he awoke