London ten years ago was much less nocturnal than it is now.  And not so brightly lit.  Down the long streets came no traffic but an occasional hansom.  Here and there a cat halted or bolted in the road.  Near Piccadilly a policeman hovered artfully in a doorway, and then came a few belated prostitutes waylaying the passers-by, and a few youths and men, wearily lust driven.

As he turned up New Bond Street he saw a figure that struck him as familiar.  Surely!—­it was Billy Prothero!  Or at any rate it was astonishingly like Billy Prothero.  He glanced again and the likeness was more doubtful.  The man had his back to Benham, he was halting and looking back at a woman.

By some queer flash of intuition it came to Benham that even if this was not Prothero, still Prothero did these things.  It might very well be Prothero even, though, as he now saw, it wasn’t.  Everybody did these things. . . .

It came into Benham’s head for the first time that life could be tiresome.

This Bond Street was a tiresome place; with its shops all shut and muffled, its shops where in the crowded daytime one bought costly furniture, costly clothes, costly scent, sweets, bibelots, pictures, jewellery, presents of all sorts, clothes for Mrs. Skelmersdale, sweets for Mrs. Skelmersdale, presents for Mrs. Skelmersdale, all the elaborate fittings and equipage of—­that!

“Good night, dear,” a woman drifted by him.

“I’ve said good night,” he cried, “I’ve said good night,” and so went on to his flat.  The unquenchable demand, the wearisome insatiability of sex!  When everything else has gone, then it shows itself bare in the bleak small hours.  And at first it had seemed so light a matter!  He went to bed, feeling dog-tired, he went to bed at an hour and with a finished completeness that Merkle would have regarded as entirely becoming in a young gentleman of his position.

And a little past three o’clock in the morning he awoke to a mood of indescribable desolation.  He awoke with a start to an agony of remorse and self-reproach.

9

For a time he lay quite still staring at the darkness, then he groaned and turned over.  Then, suddenly, like one who fancies he hears a strange noise, he sat up in bed and listened.  “Oh, God!” he said at last.

And then:  “Oh!  The dirtiness of life!  The dirty muddle of life!

“What are we doing with life?  What are we all doing with life?

“It isn’t only this poor Milly business.  This only brings it to a head.  Of course she wants money. . . .”

His thoughts came on again.

“But the ugliness!

“Why did I begin it?”

He put his hands upon his knees and pressed his eyes against the backs of his hands and so remained very still, a blankness beneath his own question.

After a long interval his mind moved again.