“Go away from me!  How can you help me?  All I’ve done has been a failure!  Failure!  Failure!”

8

That night the silences of Finacue Street heard Benham’s voice again.  “I must do my job,” he was repeating, “I must do my job.  Anyhow. . . .”

And then after a long pause, like a watchword and just a little unsurely:  “Aristocracy. . . .”

The next day his resolution had to bear the brunt of a second ordeal.  Mrs. Skelmersdale behaved beautifully and this made everything tormentingly touching and difficult.  She convinced him she was really in love with him, and indeed if he could have seen his freshness and simplicity through her experienced eyes he would have known there was sound reason why she should have found him exceptional.  And when his clumsy hints of compensation could no longer be ignored she treated him with a soft indignation, a tender resentment, that left him soft and tender.  She looked at him with pained eyes and a quiver of the lips.  What did he think she was?  And then a little less credibly, did he think she would have given herself to him if she hadn’t been in love with him?  Perhaps that was not altogether true, but at any rate it was altogether true to her when she said it, and it was manifest that she did not for a moment intend him to have the cheap consolation of giving her money.  But, and that seemed odd to Benham, she would not believe, just as Lady Marayne would not believe, that there was not some other woman in the case.  He assured her and she seemed reassured, and then presently she was back at exactly the same question.  Would no woman ever understand the call of Asia, the pride of duty, the desire for the world?

One sort of woman perhaps. . . .

It was odd that for the first time now, in the sunshine of Kensington Gardens, he saw the little gossamer lines that tell that thirty years and more have passed over a face, a little wrinkling of the eyelids, a little hardening of the mouth.  How slight it is, how invisible it has been, how suddenly it appears!  And the sunshine of the warm April afternoon, heightened it may be by her determined unmercenary pose, betrayed too the faintest hint of shabbiness in her dress.  He had never noticed these shadows upon her or her setting before and their effect was to fill him with a strange regretful tenderness. . . .

Perhaps men only begin to love when they cease to be dazzled and admire.  He had thought she might reproach him, he had felt and feared she might set herself to stir his senses, and both these expectations had been unjust to her he saw, now that he saw her beside him, a brave, rather ill-advised and unlucky little struggler, stung and shamed.  He forgot the particulars of that first lunch of theirs together and he remembered his mother’s second contemptuous “Stuff!”