"But I'm NOT like my father!" said Benham puzzled.

"No," she insisted, and with an air of appealing to his soberer reason,
"so why should you go LOOKING like him? That CONCERNED expression...."

She jumped to her feet. "Poff," she said, "I want to go and see the
evening primroses pop. You and I are talking nonsense. THEY don't have
ideas anyhow. They just pop--as God meant them to do. What stupid things
we human beings are!"

Her philosophical moments were perhaps the most baffling of all.

6

Billy Prothero became the symbol in the mind of Lady Marayne for all
that disappointed her in Benham. He had to become the symbol, because
she could not think of complicated or abstract things, she had to make
things personal, and he was the only personality available. She fretted
over his existence for some days therefore (once she awakened and
thought about him in the night), and then suddenly she determined to
grasp her nettle. She decided to seize and obliterate this Prothero.
He must come to Chexington and be thoroughly and conclusively led on,
examined, ransacked, shown up, and disposed of for ever. At once. She
was not quite clear how she meant to do this, but she was quite resolved
that it had to be done. Anything is better than inaction.

There was a little difficulty about dates and engagements, but he came,
and through the season of expectation Benham, who was now for the first
time in contact with the feminine nature, was delighted at the apparent
change to cordiality. So that he talked of Billy to his mother much more
than he had ever done before.

Billy had been his particular friend at Minchinghampton, at least
during the closing two years of his school life. Billy had fallen into
friendship with Benham, as some of us fall in love, quite suddenly, when
he saw Benham get down from the fence and be sick after his encounter
with the bull. Already Billy was excited by admiration, but it was the
incongruity of the sickness conquered him. He went back to the school
with his hands more than usually in his pockets, and no eyes for
anything but this remarkable strung-up fellow-creature. He felt he had
never observed Benham before, and he was astonished that he had not done
so.

Billy Prothero was a sturdy sort of boy, generously wanting in good
looks. His hair was rough, and his complexion muddy, and he walked
about with his hands in his pockets, long flexible lips protruded in
a whistle, and a rather shapel