“Did your wheel get into it?” he asked.  Benham affected not to hear.  He was evidently in no mood for story-telling.

“Why did you get down, Prothero?” he asked abruptly, with the note of suppressed anger thickening his voice.

Prothero became vividly red.  “I don’t know,” he said, after an interval.

“I do,” said Benham, and they went on in a rich and active silence to Cambridge, and the bicycle repair shop in Bridge Street, and Trinity College.  At the gate of Trinity Benham stopped, and conveyed rather by acts than words that Prothero was to descend.  He got down meekly enough, although he felt that the return to Maltby’s yard might have many points of interest.  But the spirit had gone out of him.

12

For three days the two friends avoided each other, and then Prothero went to Benham’s room.  Benham was smoking cigarettes—­Lady Marayne, in the first warmth of his filial devotion, had prohibited his pipe—­ and reading Webb’s industrial democracy.  “Hello!” he said coldly, scarcely looking up, and continued to read that absorbing work.

“I keep on thinking how I jumped down from that damned dog-cart,” said Prothero, without any preface.

“It didn’t matter in the least,” said Benham distantly.

“Oh!  Rot,” said Prothero.  “I behaved like a coward.”

Benham shut his book.

“Benham,” said Prothero.  “You are right about aristocracy, and I am wrong.  I’ve been thinking about it night and day.”

Benham betrayed no emotion.  But his tone changed.  “Billy,” he said, “there are cigarettes and whiskey in the corner.  Don’t make a fuss about a trifle.”

“No whiskey,” said Billy, and lit a cigarette.  “And it isn’t a trifle.”

He came to Benham’s hearthrug.  “That business,” he said, “has changed all my views.  No—­don’t say something polite!  I see that if one hasn’t the habit of pride one is bound to get off a dogcart when it seems likely to smash.  You have the habit of pride, and I haven’t.  So far as the habit of pride goes, I come over to the theory of aristocracy.”

Benham said nothing, but he put down Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and reached out for and got and lit a cigarette.

“I give up ‘Go as you please.’  I give up the natural man.  I admit training.  I perceive I am lax and flabby, unguarded, I funk too much, I eat too much, and I drink too much.  And, yet, what I have always liked in you, Benham, is just this—­that you don’t.”

“I do,” said Benham.

“Do what?”

“Funk.”

“Benham, I believe that naturally you funk as much as I do.  You’re more a thing of nerves than I am, far more.  But you keep yourself up to the mark, and I have let myself get flabby.  You’re so right.  You’re so utterly right.  These last nights I’ve confessed it—­ aloud.  I had an inkling of it—­after that rag.  But now it’s as clear as daylight.  I don’t know if you mean to go on with me, after what’s happened, but anyhow I want you to know, whether you end our friendship or not—­ "