ewhere near Dorking and
surveyed all the tumbled wooded spaces of the Weald.... It is after all
not so great a country this Sussex, nor so hilly, from deepest valley to
highest crest is not six hundred feet, yet what a greatness of effect it
can achieve! There is something in those downland views which, like sea
views, lifts a mind out to the skies. All England it seemed was there to
Benham's vision, and the purpose of the English, and his own purpose in
the world. For a long time he surveyed the large delicacy of the detail
before him, the crests, the tree-protected houses, the fields and
farmsteads, the distant gleams of water. And then he became interested
in the men who were working in the chalk pit down below.

They at any rate were not troubled with the problem of what to do with
their lives.

13

Benham found his mind was now running clear, and so abundantly that he
could scarcely, he felt, keep pace with it. As he thought his flow of
ideas was tinged with a fear that he might forget what he was thinking.
In an instant, for the first time in his mental existence, he could have
imagined he had discovered Labour and seen it plain. A little while ago
and he had seemed a lonely man among the hills, but indeed he was not
lonely, these men had been with him all the time, and he was free to
wander, to sit here, to think and choose simply because those men down
there were not free. HE WAS SPENDING THEIR LEISURE.... Not once but
many times with Prothero had he used the phrase RICHESSE OBLIGE. Now
he remembered it. He began to remember a mass of ideas that had been
overlaid and stifling within him. This was what Merkle and the club
servants and the entertainments and engagements and his mother and
the artistic touts and the theatrical touts and the hunting and the
elaboration of games and--Mrs. Skelmersdale and all that had clustered
thickly round him in London had been hiding from him. Those men below
there had not been trusted to choose their work; they had been given it.
And he had been trusted....

And now to grapple with it! Now to get it clear! What work was he going
to do? That settled, he would deal with his distractions readily enough.
Until that was settled he was lax and exposed to every passing breeze of
invitation.

"What work am I going to do? What work am I going to do?" He repeated
it.

It is the only question for the aristocrat. What amusement? That for
a footman on holiday. That for a silly