hys of life.... Because one believes.... But why
believe it? Left to himself Benham would have felt the mere asking of
this question was a thing ignoble, not to be tolerated. It was, as it
were, treason to nobility. But Prothero put it one afternoon in a way
that permitted no high dismissal of their doubts. "You can't build your
honour on fudge, Benham. Like committing sacrilege--in order to buy a
cloth for the altar."

By that Benham was slipped from the recognized code and launched upon
speculations which became the magnificent research.

It was not only in complexion and stature and ways of thinking that
Billy and Benham contrasted. Benham inclined a little to eloquence, he
liked very clean hands, he had a dread of ridiculous outlines. Prothero
lapsed readily into ostentatious slovenliness, when his hands were dirty
he pitied them sooner than scrubbed them, he would have worn an overcoat
with one tail torn off rather than have gone cold. Moreover, Prothero
had an earthy liking for animals, he could stroke and tickle strange
cats until they wanted to leave father and mother and all earthly
possessions and follow after him, and he mortgaged a term's pocket money
and bought and kept a small terrier in the school house against all law
and tradition, under the baseless pretence that it was a stray animal
of unknown origin. Benham, on the other hand, was shy with small animals
and faintly hostile to big ones. Beasts he thought were just beasts.
And Prothero had a gift for caricature, while Benham's aptitude was for
music.

It was Prothero's eyes and pencil that first directed Benham to the
poor indolences and evasions and insincerities of the masters. It was
Prothero's wicked pictures that made him see the shrivelled absurdity
of the vulgar theology. But it was Benham who stood between Prothero
and that rather coarsely conceived epicureanism that seemed his logical
destiny. When quite early in their Cambridge days Prothero's
revolt against foppery reached a nadir of personal neglect, and two
philanthropists from the rooms below him, goaded beyond the normal
tolerance of Trinity, and assisted by two sportsmen from Trinity Hall,
burnt his misshapen straw hat (after partly filling it with gunpowder
and iron filings) and sought to duck him in the fountain in the court,
it was Benham, in a state between distress and madness, and armed with
a horn-handled cane of exceptional size, who intervened, turned the
business into a bl