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Benham’s expedition to China with Prothero was essentially a wrestle between his high resolve to work out his conception of the noble life to the utmost limit and his curiously invincible affection and sympathy for the earthliness of that inglorious little don.  Although Benham insisted upon the dominance of life by noble imaginations and relentless reasonableness, he would never altogether abandon the materialism of life.  Prothero had once said to him, “You are the advocate of the brain and I of the belly.  Only, only we respect each other.”  And at another time, “You fear emotions and distrust sensations.  I invite them.  You do not drink gin because you think it would make you weep.  But if I could not weep in any other way I would drink gin.”  And it was under the influence of Prothero that Benham turned from the haughty intellectualism, the systematized superiorities and refinements, the caste marks and defensive dignities of India to China, that great teeming stinking tank of humorous yellow humanity.

Benham had gone to Prothero again after a bout of elevated idealism.  It was only very slowly that he reconciled his mind to the idea of an entirely solitary pursuit of his aristocratic dream.  For some time as he went about the world he was trying to bring himself into relationship with the advanced thinkers, the liberal-minded people who seemed to promise at least a mental and moral co-operation.  Yet it is difficult to see what co-operation was possible unless it was some sort of agreement that presently they should all shout together.  And it was after a certain pursuit of Rabindranath Tagore, whom he met in Hampstead, that a horror of perfect manners and perfect finish came upon him, and he fled from that starry calm to the rich uncleanness of the most undignified fellow of Trinity.  And as an advocate and exponent of the richness of the lower levels of life, as the declared antagonist of caste and of the uttermost refinements of pride, Prothero went with Benham by way of Siberia to the Chinese scene.

Their controversy was perceptible at every dinner-table in their choice of food and drink.  Benham was always wary and Prothero always appreciative.  It peeped out in the distribution of their time, in the direction of their glances.  Whenever women walked about, Prothero gave way to a sort of ethnological excitement.  “That girl—­a wonderful racial type.”  But in Moscow he was sentimental.  He insisted on going again to the Cosmopolis Bazaar, and when he had ascertained that Anna Alexievna had vanished and left no trace he prowled the streets until the small hours.

In the eastward train he talked intermittently of her.  “I should have defied Cambridge,” he said.

But at every stopping station he got out upon the platform ethnologically alert. . . .

Theoretically Benham was disgusted with Prothero.  Really he was not disgusted at all.  There was something about Prothero like a sparrow, like a starling, like a Scotch terrier. . . .  These, too, are morally objectionable creatures that do not disgust. . . .