Under cross-examination Mr. Rathbone-Sanders became entangled and prophetic.  It was evident he had never thought out his “democratic,” he had rested in some vague tangle of idealism from which Benham now set himself with the zeal of a specialist to rout him.  Such an argument sprang up as one meets with rarely beyond the happy undergraduate’s range.  Everybody lived in the discussion, even Amanda’s mother listened visibly.  Betty said she herself was certainly democratic and Mrs. Wilder had always thought herself to be so, and outside the circle round the fire Amanda hovered impatiently, not quite sure of her side as yet, but eager to come down with emphasis at the first flash of intimation.

She came down vehemently on Benham’s.

And being a very clear-cutting personality with an instinct for the material rendering of things, she also came and sat beside him on the little square-cornered sofa.

“Of course, Mr. Rathbone-Sanders,” she said, “of course the world must belong to the people who dare.  Of course people aren’t all alike, and dull people, as Mr. Benham says, and spiteful people, and narrow people have no right to any voice at all in things. . . .”

4

In saying this she did but echo Benham’s very words, and all she said and did that evening was in quick response to Benham’s earnest expression of his views.  She found Benham a delightful novelty.  She liked to argue because there was no other talk so lively, and she had perhaps a lurking intellectual grudge against Mr. Rathbone-Sanders that made her welcome an ally.  Everything from her that night that even verges upon the notable has been told, and yet it sufficed, together with something in the clear, long line of her limbs, in her voice, in her general physical quality, to convince Benham that she was the freest, finest, bravest spirit that he had ever encountered.

In the papers he left behind him was to be found his perplexed endeavours to explain this mental leap, that after all his efforts still remained unexplained.  He had been vividly impressed by the decision and courage of her treatment of the dogs; it was just the sort of thing he could not do.  And there was a certain contagiousness in the petting admiration with which her family treated her.  But she was young and healthy and so was he, and in a second mystery lies the key of the first.  He had fallen in love with her, and that being so whatever he needed that instantly she was.  He needed a companion, clean and brave and understanding. . . .

In his bed in the Ship that night he thought of nothing but her before he went to sleep, and when next morning he walked on his way over the South Downs to Chichester his mind was full of her image and of a hundred pleasant things about her.  In his confessions he wrote, “I felt there was a sword in her spirit.  I felt she was as clean as the wind.”