For a time Benham was in love with the idea of London.  He got maps of London and books about London.  He made plans to explore its various regions.  He tried to grasp it all, from the conscious picturesqueness of its garden suburbs to the factories of Croydon, from the clerk-villadoms of Ealing to the inky streams of Bow.  In those days there were passenger steamboats that would take one from the meadows of Hampton Court past the whole spectacle of London out to the shipping at Greenwich and the towed liners, the incessant tugs, the heaving portals of the sea. . . .  His time was far too occupied for him to carry out a tithe of these expeditions he had planned, but he had many walks that bristled with impressions.  Northward and southward, eastward and westward a dreaming young man could wander into a wilderness of population, polite or sombre, poor, rich, or middle-class, but all ceaselessly active, all urgently pressing, as it seemed, to their part in the drama of the coming years.  He loved the late afternoon, when every artery is injected and gorged with the multitudinous home-going of the daily workers, he loved the time of lighting up, and the clustering excitements of the late hours.  And he went out southward and eastward into gaunt regions of reeking toil.  As yet he knew nothing of the realities of industrialism.  He saw only the beauty of the great chimneys that rose against the sullen smoke-barred sunsets, and he felt only the romance of the lurid shuddering flares that burst out from squat stacks of brickwork and lit the emptiness of strange and slovenly streets. . . .

And this London was only the foreground of the great scene upon which he, as a prosperous, well-befriended young Englishman, was free to play whatever part he could.  This narrow turbid tidal river by which he walked ran out under the bridges eastward beneath the grey-blue clouds towards Germany, towards Russia, and towards Asia, which still seemed in those days so largely the Englishman’s Asia.  And when you turned about at Blackfriars Bridge this sense of the round world was so upon you that you faced not merely Westminster, but the icy Atlantic and America, which one could yet fancy was a land of Englishmen—­Englishmen a little estranged.  At any rate they assimilated, they kept the tongue.  The shipping in the lower reaches below the Tower there carried the flags of every country under the sky. . . .  As he went along the riverside he met a group of dusky students, Chinese or Japanese.  Cambridge had abounded in Indians; and beneath that tall clock tower at Westminster it seemed as though the world might centre.  The background of the Englishman’s world reached indeed to either pole, it went about the earth, his background it was—­for all that he was capable of doing.  All this had awaited him. . . .

Is it any wonder if a young man with an excitable imagination came at times to the pitch of audible threats?  If the extreme indulgence of his opportunity and his sense of ability and vigour lifted his vanity at moments to the kingly pitch?  If he ejaculated and made a gesture or so as he went along the Embankment?