dark moments that Benham was most persecuted by his memories of Amanda and most distressed by this suspicion that the Research Magnificent was a priggishness, a pretentious logomachy.  Prothero could indeed hint as much so skilfully that at times the dream of nobility seemed an insult to the sunshine, to the careless laughter of children, to the good light in wine and all the warm happiness of existence.  And then Amanda would peep out of the dusk and whisper, “Of course if you could leave me—!  Was I not life?  Even now if you cared to come back to me—­ For I loved you best and loved you still, old Cheetah, long after you had left me to follow your dreams. . . .  Even now I am drifting further into lies and the last shreds of dignity drop from me; a dirty, lost, and shameful leopard I am now, who was once clean and bright. . . .  You could come back, Cheetah, and you could save me yet.  If you would love me. . . .”

In certain moods she could wring his heart by such imagined speeches, the very quality of her voice was in them, a softness that his ear had loved, and not only could she distress him, but when Benham was in this heartache mood, when once she had set him going, then his little mother also would rise against him, touchingly indignant, with her blue eyes bright with tears; and his frowsty father would back towards him and sit down complaining that he was neglected, and even little Mrs. Skelmersdale would reappear, bravely tearful on her chair looking after him as he slunk away from her through Kensington Gardens; indeed every personal link he had ever had to life could in certain moods pull him back through the door of self-reproach Amanda opened and set him aching and accusing himself of harshness and self-concentration.  The very kittens of his childhood revived forgotten moments of long-repented hardness.  For a year before Prothero was killed there were these heartaches.  That tragedy gave them their crowning justification.  All these people said in this form or that, “You owed a debt to us, you evaded it, you betrayed us, you owed us life out of yourself, love and services, and you have gone off from us all with this life that was ours, to live by yourself in dreams about the rule of the world, and with empty phantoms of power and destiny.  All this was intellectualization.  You sacrificed us to the thin things of the mind.  There is no rule of the world at all, or none that a man like you may lay hold upon.  The rule of the world is a fortuitous result of incalculably multitudinous forces.  But all of us you could have made happier.  You could have spared us distresses.  Prothero died because of you.  Presently it will be the turn of your father, your mother—­Amanda perhaps. . . .”

He made no written note of his heartaches, but he made several memoranda about priggishness that White read and came near to understanding.  In spite of the tugging at his heart-strings, Benham was making up his mind to be a prig.  He weighed the cold uningratiating virtues of priggishness against his smouldering passion for Amanda, and against his obstinate sympathy for Prothero’s grossness and his mother’s personal pride, and he made his choice.  But it was a reluctant choice.