rawn up to it. The third time he
waved his hat clumsily, and she started and then answered with her hand.
Then the trees hid her....

This sex business was a damnable business. If only because it made one
hurt women....

He had trampled on Mrs. Skelmersdale, he had hurt and disappointed
his mother. Was he a brute? Was he a cold-blooded prig? What was this
aristocracy? Was his belief anything more than a theory? Was he only
dreaming of a debt to the men in the quarry, to the miners, to the men
in the stokeholes, to the drudges on the fields? And while he dreamt he
wounded and distressed real living creatures in the sleep-walk of his
dreaming....

So long as he stuck to his dream he must at any rate set his face
absolutely against the establishment of any further relations with
women.

Unless they were women of an entirely different type, women hardened and
tempered, who would understand.

9

So Benham was able to convert the unfortunate Mrs. Skelmersdale into a
tender but for a long time an entirely painful memory. But mothers are
not so easily disposed of, and more particularly a mother whose conduct
is coloured deeply by an extraordinary persuasion of having paid for her
offspring twice over. Nolan was inexplicable; he was, Benham understood
quite clearly, never to be mentioned again; but somehow from the past
his shadow and his legacy cast a peculiar and perplexing shadow of
undefined obligation upon Benham's outlook. His resolution to go round
the world carried on his preparations rapidly and steadily, but at the
same time his mother's thwarted and angry bearing produced a torture
of remorse in him. It was constantly in his mind, like the suit of the
importunate widow, that he ought to devote his life to the little lady's
happiness and pride, and his reason told him that even if he wanted to
make this sacrifice he couldn't; the mere act of making it would produce
so entirely catastrophic a revulsion. He could as soon have become a
croquet champion or the curate of Chexington church, lines of endeavour
which for him would have led straightly and simply to sacrilegious
scandal or manslaughter with a mallet.

There is so little measure in the wild atonements of the young that it
was perhaps as well for the Research Magnificent that the remorses of
this period of Benham's life were too complicated and scattered for a
cumulative effect. In the background of his mind and less subdued
than its importance cou