Benham found his mind was now running clear, and so abundantly that he could scarcely, he felt, keep pace with it.  As he thought his flow of ideas was tinged with a fear that he might forget what he was thinking.  In an instant, for the first time in his mental existence, he could have imagined he had discovered Labour and seen it plain.  A little while ago and he had seemed a lonely man among the hills, but indeed he was not lonely, these men had been with him all the time, and he was free to wander, to sit here, to think and choose simply because those men down there were not free.  He was spending their leisure. . . .  Not once but many times with Prothero had he used the phrase RICHESSE oblige.  Now he remembered it.  He began to remember a mass of ideas that had been overlaid and stifling within him.  This was what Merkle and the club servants and the entertainments and engagements and his mother and the artistic touts and the theatrical touts and the hunting and the elaboration of games and—­Mrs. Skelmersdale and all that had clustered thickly round him in London had been hiding from him.  Those men below there had not been trusted to choose their work; they had been given it.  And he had been trusted. . . .

And now to grapple with it!  Now to get it clear!  What work was he going to do?  That settled, he would deal with his distractions readily enough.  Until that was settled he was lax and exposed to every passing breeze of invitation.

“What work am I going to do?  What work am I going to do?” He repeated it.

It is the only question for the aristocrat.  What amusement?  That for a footman on holiday.  That for a silly child, for any creature that is kept or led or driven.  That perhaps for a tired invalid, for a toiler worked to a rag.  But able-bodied amusement!  The arms of Mrs. Skelmersdale were no worse than the solemn aimlessness of hunting, and an evening of dalliance not an atom more reprehensible than an evening of chatter.  It was the waste of him that made the sin.  His life in London had been of a piece together.  It was well that his intrigue had set a light on it, put a point to it, given him this saving crisis of the nerves.  That, indeed, is the chief superiority of idle love-making over other more prevalent forms of idleness and self-indulgence; it does at least bear its proper label.  It is reprehensible.  It brings your careless honour to the challenge of concealment and shabby evasions and lies. . . .

But in this pellucid air things took their proper proportions again.

And now what was he to do?

“Politics,” he said aloud to the turf and the sky.

Is there any other work for an aristocratic man? . . .  Science?  One could admit science in that larger sense that sweeps in History, or Philosophy.  Beyond that whatever work there is is work for which men are paid.  Art?  Art is nothing aristocratic except when it is a means of scientific or philosophical expression.  Art that does not argue nor demonstrate nor discover is merely the craftsman’s impudence.