Lady Marayne’s plans for her son’s future varied very pleasantly.  She was an industrious reader of biographies, and more particularly of the large fair biographies of the recently contemporary; they mentioned people she knew, they recalled scenes, each sowed its imaginative crop upon her mind, a crop that flourished and flowered until a newer growth came to oust it.  She saw her son a diplomat, a prancing pro-consul, an empire builder, a trusted friend of the august, the bold leader of new movements, the saviour of ancient institutions, the youngest, brightest, modernest of prime ministers—­ or a tremendously popular poet.  As a rule she saw him unmarried—­ with a wonderful little mother at his elbow.  Sometimes in romantic flashes he was adored by German princesses or eloped with Russian grand-duchesses!  But such fancies were hors d’oeuvre.  The modern biography deals with the career.  Every project was bright, every project had go—­tremendous go.  And they all demanded a hero, debonnaire and balanced.  And Benham, as she began to perceive, wasn’t balanced.  Something of his father had crept into him, a touch of moral stiffness.  She knew the flavour of that so well.  It was a stumbling, an elaboration, a spoil-sport and weakness.  She tried not to admit to herself that even in the faintest degree it was there.  But it was there.

“Tell me all that you are doing now,” she said to him one afternoon when she had got him to herself during his first visit to Chexington Manor.  “How do you like Cambridge?  Are you making friends?  Have you joined that thing—­the Union, is it?—­and delivered your maiden speech?  If you’re for politics, Poff, that’s your game.  Have you begun it?”

She lay among splashes of sunshine on the red cushions in the punt, a little curled-up figure of white, with her sweet pale animated face warmed by the reflection of her red sunshade, and her eyes like little friendly heavens.  And he, lean, and unconsciously graceful, sat at her feet and admired her beyond measure, and rejoiced that now at last they were going to be ever so much together, and doubted if it would be possible ever to love any other woman so much as he did her.

He tried to tell her of Cambridge and his friends and the undergraduate life he was leading, but he found it difficult.  All sorts of things that seemed right and good at Trinity seemed out of drawing in the peculiar atmosphere she created about her.  All sorts of clumsiness and youthfulness in himself and his associates he felt she wouldn’t accept, couldn’t accept, that it would be wrong of her to accept.  Before they could come before her they must wear a bravery.  He couldn’t, for instance, tell her how Billy Prothero, renouncing vanity and all social pretension, had worn a straw hat into November and the last stages of decay, and how it had been burnt by a special commission ceremonially in the great court.  He couldn’t convey