It was unlikely that she and Mrs. Skelmersdale would ever meet, and it seemed to him that it would be a particularly offensive incident for them to meet.

There were times now when life took on a grey and boring quality such as it had never had before he met Mrs. Skelmersdale, and the only remedy was to go to her.  She could restore his nervous tranquillity, his feeling of solidity and reality, his pride in himself.  For a time, that is.

Nevertheless his mind was as a whole pervaded by the feeling that he ought not to have been taken by surprise.

And he had the clearest conviction in his mind that if now he could be put back again to the day before that lunch. . . .

No! he should not have gone there to lunch.

He had gone there to see her Clementi piano.

Had he or had he not thought beforehand of any other possibility?

On a point so vital his memory was curiously unsure.

8

The worry and disorganization of Benham’s life and thoughts increased as the spring advanced.  His need in some way to pull things together became overpowering.  He began to think of Billy Prothero, more and more did it seem desirable to have a big talk with Billy and place everything that had got disturbed.  Benham thought of going to Cambridge for a week of exhaustive evenings.  Small engagements delayed that expedition. . . .

Then came a day in April when all the world seemed wrong to Benham.  He was irritable; his will was unstable; whatever presented itself to be done presented itself as undesirable; he could settle to nothing.  He had been keeping away from Mrs. Skelmersdale and in the morning there came a little note from her designed to correct this abstention.  She understood the art of the attractive note.  But he would not decide to go to her.  He left the note unanswered.

Then came his mother at the telephone and it became instantly certain to Benham that he could not play the dutiful son that evening.  He answered her that he could not come to dinner.  He had engaged himself.  “Where?”

“With some men.”

There was a pause and then his mother’s voice came, flattened by disappointment.  “Very well then, little Poff.  Perhaps I shall see you to-morrow.”

He replaced the receiver and fretted back into his study, where the notes on aristocracy lay upon his desk, the notes he had been pretending to work over all the morning.

“Damned liar!” he said, and then, “Dirty liar!” He decided to lunch at the club, and in the afternoon he was moved to telephone an appointment with his siren.  And having done that he was bound to keep it.

About one o’clock in the morning he found himself walking back to Finacue Street.  He was no longer a fretful conflict of nerves, but if anything he was less happy than he had been before.  It seemed to him that London was a desolate and inglorious growth.