before he could answer her, and for a long time he was full of unspoken answers explaining that in view of her deliberate unfaithfulness the position she took up was absurd.  She had spoilt her own fur.  But what was more penetrating and distressing in this dream was not so much the case Amanda stated as the atmosphere of unconquerable intimacy between them, as though they still belonged to each other, soul to soul, as though nothing that had happened afterwards could have destroyed their common responsibility and the common interest of their first unstinted union.  She was hurt, and of course he was hurt.  He began to see that his marriage to Amanda was still infinitely more than a technical bond.

And having perceived that much he presently began to doubt whether she realized anything of the sort.  Her letters fluctuated very much in tone, but at times they were as detached and guarded as a schoolgirl writing to a cousin.  Then it seemed to Benham an extraordinary fraud on her part that she should presume to come into his dream with an entirely deceptive closeness and confidence.  She began to sound him in these latter letters upon the possibility of divorce.  This, which he had been quite disposed to concede in London, now struck him as an outrageous suggestion.  He wrote to ask her why, and she responded exasperatingly that she thought it was “better.”  But, again, why better?  It is remarkable that although his mind had habituated itself to the idea that Easton was her lover in London, her thought of being divorced, no doubt to marry again, filled him with jealous rage.  She asked him to take the blame in the divorce proceedings.  There, again, he found himself ungenerous.  He did not want to do that.  Why should he do that?  As a matter of fact he was by no means reconciled to the price he had paid for his Research Magnificent; he regretted his Amanda acutely.  He was regretting her with a regret that grew when by all the rules of life it ought to be diminishing.

It was in consequence of that regret and his controversies with Prothero while they travelled together in China that his concern about what he called priggishness arose.  It is a concern that one may suppose has a little afflicted every reasonably self-conscious man who has turned from the natural passionate personal life to religion or to public service or any abstract devotion.  These things that are at least more extensive than the interests of flesh and blood have a trick of becoming unsubstantial, they shine gloriously and inspiringly upon the imagination, they capture one and isolate one and then they vanish out of sight.  It is far easier to be entirely faithful to friend or lover than it is to be faithful to a cause or to one’s country or to a religion.  In the glow of one’s first service that larger idea may be as closely spontaneous as a handclasp, but in the darkness that comes as the glow dies away there is a fearful sense of unreality.  It was in such