Benham’s deliberate assumption of the equestrian role brought him into contact with a new set of acquaintances, conscious of political destinies.  They were amiable, hard young men, almost affectedly unaffected; they breakfasted before dawn to get in a day’s hunting, and they saw to it that Benham’s manifest determination not to discredit himself did not lead to his breaking his neck.  Their bodies were beautifully tempered, and their minds were as flabby as Prothero’s body.  Among them were such men as Lord Breeze and Peter Westerton, and that current set of Corinthians who supposed themselves to be resuscitating the Young England movement and Tory Democracy.  Poor movements which indeed have never so much lived as suffered chronic resuscitation.  These were days when Tariff Reform was only an inglorious possibility for the Tory Party, and Young England had yet to demonstrate its mental quality in an anti-socialist campaign.  Seen from the perspectives of Cambridge and Chexington, the Tory party was still a credible basis for the adventure of a young man with an aristocratic theory in his mind.

These were the days when the strain and extremity of a dangerous colonial war were fresh in people’s minds, when the quality of the public consciousness was braced up by its recent response to unanticipated demands.  The conflict of stupidities that had caused the war was overlaid and forgotten by a hundred thousand devotions, by countless heroic deaths and sufferings, by a pacification largely conceived and broadly handled.  The nation had displayed a belated regard for its honour and a sustained passion for great unities.  It was still possible for Benham to regard the empire as a splendid opportunity, and London as the conceivable heart of the world.  He could think of Parliament as a career, and of a mingling of aristocratic socialism based on universal service with a civilizing imperialism as a purpose. . . .

But his thoughts had gone wider and deeper than that. . . .

Already when Benham came to London he had begun to dream of possibilities that went beyond the accidental states and empires of to-day.  Prothero’s mind, replete with historical detail, could find nothing but absurdity in the alliances and dynasties and loyalties of our time.  “Patched up things, Benham, temporary, pretentious.  All very well for the undignified man, the democratic man, to take shelter under, all very well for the humourist to grin and bear, all very well for the crowd and the quack, but not for the aristocrat—­ No!—­his mind cuts like steel and burns like fire.  Lousy sheds they are, plastered hoardings . . . and such a damned nuisance too!  For any one who wants to do honourable things!  With their wars and their diplomacies, their tariffs and their encroachments; all their humbugging struggles, their bloody and monstrous struggles, that finally work out to no end at all. . . .  If you are going for the handsome thing