you see there's other things in the world for a man than having
a good time and making love. I'm for something else than that. You've
given me the splendidest time--..."

"I see," cried Lady Marayne, "I see. I've bored you. I might have known
I should have bored you."

"You've NOT bored me!" cried Benham.

He threw himself on the rug at her feet. "Oh, mother!" he said, "little,
dear, gallant mother, don't make life too hard for me. I've got to do my
job, I've got to find my job."

"I've bored you," she wept.

Suddenly she was weeping with all the unconcealed distressing grief of
a disappointed child. She put her pretty be-ringed little hands in front
of her face and recited the accumulation of her woes.

"I've done all I can for you, planned for you, given all my time for you
and I've BORED you."

"Mother!"

"Don't come near me, Poff! Don't TOUCH me! All my plans. All my
ambitions. Friends--every one. You don't know all I've given up for
you...."

He had never seen his mother weep before. Her self-abandonment amazed
him. Her words were distorted by her tears. It was the most terrible and
distressing of crises....

"Go away from me! How can you help me? All I've done has been a failure!
Failure! Failure!"

8

That night the silences of Finacue Street heard Benham's voice again. "I
must do my job," he was repeating, "I must do my job. Anyhow...."

And then after a long pause, like a watchword and just a little
unsurely: "Aristocracy...."

The next day his resolution had to bear the brunt of a second ordeal.
Mrs. Skelmersdale behaved beautifully and this made everything
tormentingly touching and difficult. She convinced him she was really
in love with him, and indeed if he could have seen his freshness and
simplicity through her experienced eyes he would have known there was
sound reason why she should have found him exceptional. And when his
clumsy hints of compensation could no longer be ignored she treated him
with a soft indignation, a tender resentment, that left him soft and
tender. She looked at him with pained eyes and a quiver of the lips.
What did he think she was? And then a little less credibly, did he think
she would have given herself to him if she hadn't been in love with him?
Perhaps that was not altogether true, but at any rate it was altogether
true to her when she said it, and it was manifest that she did not for
a moment intend him to have the cheap consolation of giving her mon