It seemed to Benham as though he was being let down out of a sunlit fairyland to this grey world again.

3

The contrast between Lady Marayne’s pretty amenities and the good woman at Seagate who urged herself almost hourly to forget that William Porphyry was not her own son, was entirely unfair.  The second Mrs. Benham’s conscientious spirit and a certain handsome ability about her fitted her far more than her predecessor for the onerous duties of a schoolmaster’s wife, but whatever natural buoyancy she possessed was outweighed by an irrepressible conviction derived from an episcopal grandparent that the remarriage of divorced persons is sinful, and by a secret but well-founded doubt whether her husband loved her with a truly romantic passion.  She might perhaps have borne either of these troubles singly, but the two crushed her spirit.

Her temperament was not one that goes out to meet happiness.  She had reluctant affections and suspected rather than welcomed the facility of other people’s.  Her susceptibility to disagreeable impressions was however very ample, and life was fenced about with protections for her “feelings.”  It filled young Benham with inexpressible indignations that his sweet own mother, so gay, so brightly cheerful that even her tears were stars, was never to be mentioned in his stepmother’s presence, and it was not until he had fully come to years of reflection that he began to realize with what honesty, kindness and patience this naturally not very happy lady had nursed, protected, mended for and generally mothered him.

4

As Benham grew to look manly and bear himself with pride, his mother’s affection for him blossomed into a passion.  She made him come down to London from Cambridge as often as she could; she went about with him; she made him squire her to theatres and take her out to dinners and sup with her at the Carlton, and in the summer she had him with her at Chexington Manor, the Hertfordshire house Sir Godfrey had given her.  And always when they parted she looked into his eyes to see if they were still clean—­whatever she meant by that—­and she kissed his forehead and cheeks and eyes and lips.  She began to make schemes for his career, she contrived introductions she judged would be useful to him later.

Everybody found the relationship charming.  Some of the more conscientious people, it is true, pretended to think that the Reverend Harold Benham was a first husband and long since dead, but that was all.  As a matter of fact, in his increasingly futile way he wasn’t, either at Seagate or in the Educational Supplement of the times.  But even the most conscientious of us are not obliged to go to Seagate or read the Educational Supplement of the times.