Presently the telephone bell would ring and he would hear the clear little voice of his mother full of imperative expectations.  He would be round for lunch?  Yes, he would be round to lunch.  And the afternoon, had he arranged to do anything with his afternoon?  No!—­ put off Chexington until tomorrow.  There was this new pianist, it was really an experience, and one might not get tickets again.  And then tea at Panton’s.  It was rather fun at Panton’s. . . .  Oh!—­ Weston Massinghay was coming to lunch.  He was a useful man to know.  So clever. . . .  So long, my dear little Son, till I see you. . . .

So life puts out its Merkle threads, as the poacher puts his hair noose about the pheasant’s neck, and while we theorize takes hold of us. . . .

It came presently home to Benham that he had been down from Cambridge for ten months, and that he was still not a step forward with the realization of the new aristocracy.  His political career waited.  He had done a quantity of things, but their net effect was incoherence.  He had not been merely passive, but his efforts to break away into creative realities had added to rather than diminished his accumulating sense of futility.

The natural development of his position under the influence of Lady Marayne had enormously enlarged the circle of his acquaintances.  He had taken part in all sorts of social occasions, and sat and listened to a representative selection of political and literary and social personages, he had been several times to the opera and to a great number and variety of plays, he had been attentively inconspicuous in several really good week-end parties.  He had spent a golden October in North Italy with his mother, and escaped from the glowing lassitude of Venice for some days of climbing in the Eastern Alps.  In January, in an outbreak of enquiry, he had gone with Lionel Maxim to St. Petersburg and had eaten zakuska, brightened his eyes with vodka, talked with a number of charming people of the war that was then imminent, listened to gipsy singers until dawn, careered in sledges about the most silent and stately of capitals, and returned with Lionel, discoursing upon autocracy and assassination, Japan, the Russian destiny, and the government of Peter the Great.  That excursion was the most after his heart of all the dispersed employments of his first year.  Through the rest of the winter he kept himself very fit, and still further qualified that nervous dislike for the horse that he had acquired from Prothero by hunting once a week in Essex.  He was incurably a bad horseman; he rode without sympathy, he was unready and convulsive at hedges and ditches, and he judged distances badly.  His white face and rigid seat and a certain joylessness of bearing in the saddle earned him the singular nickname, which never reached his ears, of the “Galvanized Corpse.”  He got through, however, at the cost of four quite trifling spills and without damaging either of the horses he rode.  And his physical self-respect increased.