It was Prothero’s eyes and pencil that first directed Benham to the poor indolences and evasions and insincerities of the masters.  It was Prothero’s wicked pictures that made him see the shrivelled absurdity of the vulgar theology.  But it was Benham who stood between Prothero and that rather coarsely conceived epicureanism that seemed his logical destiny.  When quite early in their Cambridge days Prothero’s revolt against foppery reached a nadir of personal neglect, and two philanthropists from the rooms below him, goaded beyond the normal tolerance of Trinity, and assisted by two sportsmen from Trinity Hall, burnt his misshapen straw hat (after partly filling it with gunpowder and iron filings) and sought to duck him in the fountain in the court, it was Benham, in a state between distress and madness, and armed with a horn-handled cane of exceptional size, who intervened, turned the business into a blend of wrangle and scuffle, introduced the degrading topic of duelling into a simple wholesome rag of four against one, carried him off under the cloud of horror created by this impropriety and so saved him, still only slightly wetted, not only from this indignity but from the experiment in rationalism that had provoked it.

Because Benham made it perfectly clear what he had thought and felt about this hat.

Such was the illuminating young man whom Lady Marayne decided to invite to Chexington, into the neighbourhood of herself, Sir Godfrey, and her circle of friends.

7

He was quite anxious to satisfy the requirements of Benham’s people and to do his friend credit.  He was still in the phase of being a penitent pig, and he inquired carefully into the needs and duties of a summer guest in a country house.  He knew it was quite a considerable country house, and that Sir Godfrey wasn’t Benham’s father, but like most people, he was persuaded that Lady Marayne had divorced the parental Benham.  He arrived dressed very neatly in a brown suit that had only one fault, it had not the remotest suggestion of having been made for him.  It fitted his body fairly well, it did annex his body with only a few slight incompatibilities, but it repudiated his hands and face.  He had a conspicuously old Gladstone bag and a conspicuously new despatch case, and he had forgotten black ties and dress socks and a hair brush.  He arrived in the late afternoon, was met by Benham, in tennis flannels, looking smartened up and a little unfamiliar, and taken off in a spirited dog-cart driven by a typical groom.  He met his host and hostess at dinner.

Sir Godfrey was a rationalist and a residuum.  Very much of him, too much perhaps, had gone into the acquirement and perfect performance of the caecal operation; the man one met in the social world was what was left over.  It had the effect of being quiet, but in its unobtrusive way knobby.  He had a knobby brow, with an air about it of having recently been intent, and his conversation was curiously spotted with little knobby arrested anecdotes.  If any one of any distinction was named, he would reflect and say, “Of course,—­ah, yes, I know him, I know him.  Yes, I did him a little service—­in ’96.”