was not Prothero, still Prothero did these things. It might very well
be Prothero even, though, as he now saw, it wasn't. Everybody did these
things....

It came into Benham's head for the first time that life could be
tiresome.

This Bond Street was a tiresome place; with its shops all shut and
muffled, its shops where in the crowded daytime one bought costly
furniture, costly clothes, costly scent, sweets, bibelots, pictures,
jewellery, presents of all sorts, clothes for Mrs. Skelmersdale, sweets
for Mrs. Skelmersdale, presents for Mrs. Skelmersdale, all the elaborate
fittings and equipage of--THAT!

"Good night, dear," a woman drifted by him.

"I've SAID good night," he cried, "I've SAID good night," and so went
on to his flat. The unquenchable demand, the wearisome insatiability
of sex! When everything else has gone, then it shows itself bare in the
bleak small hours. And at first it had seemed so light a matter! He went
to bed, feeling dog-tired, he went to bed at an hour and with a finished
completeness that Merkle would have regarded as entirely becoming in a
young gentleman of his position.

And a little past three o'clock in the morning he awoke to a mood of
indescribable desolation. He awoke with a start to an agony of remorse
and self-reproach.

9

For a time he lay quite still staring at the darkness, then he groaned
and turned over. Then, suddenly, like one who fancies he hears a strange
noise, he sat up in bed and listened. "Oh, God!" he said at last.

And then: "Oh! The DIRTINESS of life! The dirty muddle of life!

"What are we doing with life? What are we all doing with life?

"It isn't only this poor Milly business. This only brings it to a head.
Of course she wants money...."

His thoughts came on again.

"But the ugliness!

"Why did I begin it?"

He put his hands upon his knees and pressed his eyes against the backs
of his hands and so remained very still, a blankness beneath his own
question.

After a long interval his mind moved again.

And now it was as if he looked upon his whole existence, he seemed to
see in a large, clear, cold comprehensiveness, all the wasted days, the
fruitless activities, the futilities, the perpetual postponements
that had followed his coming to London. He saw it all as a joyless
indulgence, as a confusion of playthings and undisciplined desires, as
a succession of days that began amiably and weakly, that became steadily
more crowded with ignob