is should. So far as he was concerned, he
told himself, it did not matter whether Amanda was the daughter of a
swindler or the daughter of a god. He had no doubt that she herself had
the spirit and quality of divinity. He had seen it.

So there was nothing for it in the failure of his mother's civilities
but to increase his own. He would go down to Harting and take his leave
of these amiable outcasts himself. With a certain effusion. He would do
this soon because he was now within sight of the beginning of his world
tour. He had made his plans and prepared most of his equipment. Little
remained to do but the release of Merkle, the wrappering and locking up
of Finacue Street, which could await him indefinitely, and the buying of
tickets. He decided to take the opportunity afforded by a visit of Sir
Godfrey and Lady Marayne to the Blights, big iron people in the North of
England of so austere a morality that even Benham was ignored by it. He
announced his invasion in a little note to Mrs. Wilder. He parted from
his mother on Friday afternoon; she was already, he perceived, a little
reconciled to his project of going abroad; and contrived his arrival
at South Harting for that sunset hour which was for his imagination the
natural halo of Amanda.

"I'm going round the world," he told them simply. "I may be away for
two years, and I thought I would like to see you all again before I
started."

That was quite the way they did things.

The supper-party included Mr. Rathbone-Sanders, who displayed a curious
tendency to drift in between Benham and Amanda, a literary youth with
a Byronic visage, very dark curly hair, and a number of extraordinarily
mature chins, a girl-friend of Betty's who had cycled down from London,
and who it appeared maintained herself at large in London by drawing for
advertisements, and a silent colourless friend of Mr. Rathbone-Sanders.
The talk lit by Amanda's enthusiasm circled actively round Benham's
expedition. It was clear that the idea of giving some years to thinking
out one's possible work in the world was for some reason that remained
obscure highly irritating to both Mr. Rathbone-Sanders and the Byronic
youth. Betty too regarded it as levity when there was "so much to be
done," and the topic whacked about and rose to something like a
wrangle, and sat down and rested and got up again reinvigorated, with
a continuity of interest that Benham had never yet encountered in any
London gathering. He