“Poff, my little son,” she said, “I’m so sorry I hardly know how to tell you.  Poff, I’m sorry.  I have to tell you—­and it’s utterly beastly.”

“But what?” he asked.

“These people are dreadful people.”

“But how?”

“You’ve heard of the great Kent and Eastern Bank smash and the Marlborough Building Society frauds eight or nine years ago?”

“Vaguely.  But what has that to do with them?”

“That man Morris.”

She stopped short, and Benham nodded for her to go on.

“Her father,” said Lady Marayne.

“But who was Morris?  Really, mother, I don’t remember.”

“He was sentenced to seven years—­ten years—­I forget.  He had done all sorts of dreadful things.  He was a swindler.  And when he went out of the dock into the waiting-room—­ He had a signet ring with prussic acid in it—­ . . .”

“I remember now,” he said.

A silence fell between them.

Benham stood quite motionless on the hearthrug and stared very hard at the little volume of Henley’s poetry that lay upon the table.

He cleared his throat presently.

“You can’t go and see them then,” he said.  “After all—­since I am going abroad so soon—­ . . .  It doesn’t so very much matter.”

10

To Benham it did not seem to be of the slightest importance that Amanda’s father was a convicted swindler who had committed suicide.  Never was a resolved and conscious aristocrat so free from the hereditary delusion.  Good parents, he was convinced, are only an advantage in so far as they have made you good stuff, and bad parents are no discredit to a son or daughter of good quality.  Conceivably he had a bias against too close an examination of origins, and he held that the honour of the children should atone for the sins of the fathers and the questionable achievements of any intervening testator.  Not half a dozen rich and established families in all England could stand even the most conventional inquiry into the foundations of their pride, and only a universal amnesty could prevent ridiculous distinctions.  But he brought no accusation of inconsistency against his mother.  She looked at things with a lighter logic and a kind of genius for the acceptance of superficial values.  She was condoned and forgiven, a rescued lamb, re-established, notoriously bright and nice, and the Morrises were damned.  That was their status, exclusion, damnation, as fixed as colour in Georgia or caste in Bengal.  But if his mother’s mind worked in that way there was no reason why his should.  So far as he was concerned, he told himself, it did not matter whether Amanda was the daughter of a swindler or the daughter of a god.  He had no doubt that she herself had the spirit and quality of divinity.  He had seen it.