Indeed he knew now it had not been unexpected.  Why hadn’t he left this little sensitive soul and this little sensitive body alone?  And since he hadn’t done so, what right had he now to back out of their common adventure?  He felt a sudden wild impulse to marry Mrs. Skelmersdale, in a mood between remorse and love and self-immolation, and then a sunlit young woman with a leaping stride in her paces, passed across his heavens, pointing to Asia and Utopia and forbidding even another thought of the banns. . . .

“You will kiss me good-bye, dear, won’t you?” said Mrs. Skelmersdale, brimming over.  “You will do that.”

He couldn’t keep his arm from her little shoulders.  And as their lips touched he suddenly found himself weeping also. . . .

His spirit went limping from that interview.  She chose to stay behind in her chair and think, she said, and each time he turned back she was sitting in the same attitude looking at him as he receded, and she had one hand on the chair back and her arm drawn up to it.  The third time he waved his hat clumsily, and she started and then answered with her hand.  Then the trees hid her. . . .

This sex business was a damnable business.  If only because it made one hurt women. . . .

He had trampled on Mrs. Skelmersdale, he had hurt and disappointed his mother.  Was he a brute?  Was he a cold-blooded prig?  What was this aristocracy?  Was his belief anything more than a theory?  Was he only dreaming of a debt to the men in the quarry, to the miners, to the men in the stokeholes, to the drudges on the fields?  And while he dreamt he wounded and distressed real living creatures in the sleep-walk of his dreaming. . . .

So long as he stuck to his dream he must at any rate set his face absolutely against the establishment of any further relations with women.

Unless they were women of an entirely different type, women hardened and tempered, who would understand.

9

So Benham was able to convert the unfortunate Mrs. Skelmersdale into a tender but for a long time an entirely painful memory.  But mothers are not so easily disposed of, and more particularly a mother whose conduct is coloured deeply by an extraordinary persuasion of having paid for her offspring twice over.  Nolan was inexplicable; he was, Benham understood quite clearly, never to be mentioned again; but somehow from the past his shadow and his legacy cast a peculiar and perplexing shadow of undefined obligation upon Benham’s outlook.  His resolution to go round the world carried on his preparations rapidly and steadily, but at the same time his mother’s thwarted and angry bearing produced a torture of remorse in him.  It was constantly in his mind, like the suit of the importunate widow, that he ought to devote his life to the little lady’s happiness and pride, and his reason told him that even if he wanted to make this sacrifice he couldn’t; the mere act of making it would produce so entirely catastrophic a revulsion.  He could as soon have become a croquet champion or the curate of Chexington church, lines of endeavour which for him would have led straightly and simply to sacrilegious scandal or manslaughter with a mallet.