rt of the fascination of Amanda that she was never what he had
supposed her to be, and that nothing that he set out to do with her ever
turned out as they had planned it. Her appreciations marched before her
achievement, and when it came to climbing it seemed foolish to toil
to summits over which her spirit had flitted days before. Their Swiss
expeditions which she had foreseen as glorious wanderings amidst the
blue ice of crevasses and nights of exalted hardihood became a walking
tour of fitful vigour and abundant fun and delight. They spent a long
day on the ice of the Aletsch glacier, but they reached the inn on its
eastward side with magnificent appetites a little late for dinner.

Amanda had revealed an unexpected gift for nicknames and pretty fancies.
She named herself the Leopard, the spotless Leopard; in some obscure
way she intimated that the colour was black, but that was never to be
admitted openly, there was supposed to be some lurking traces of a rusty
brown but the word was spotless and the implication white, a dazzling
white, she would play a thousand variations on the theme; in moments of
despondency she was only a black cat, a common lean black cat, and
sacks and half-bricks almost too good for her. But Benham was always
a Cheetah. That had come to her as a revelation from heaven. But so
clearly he was a Cheetah. He was a Hunting Leopard; the only beast that
has an up-cast face and dreams and looks at you with absent-minded eyes
like a man. She laced their journeys with a fantastic monologue telling
in the third person what the Leopard and the Cheetah were thinking and
seeing and doing. And so they walked up mountains and over passes and
swam in the warm clear water of romantic lakes and loved each other
mightily always, in chestnut woods and olive orchards and flower-starred
alps and pine forests and awning-covered boats, and by sunset and
moonlight and starshine; and out of these agreeable solitudes they
came brown and dusty, striding side by side into sunlit entertaining
fruit-piled market-places and envious hotels. For days and weeks
together it did not seem to Benham that there was anything that mattered
in life but Amanda and the elemental joys of living. And then the
Research Magnificent began to stir in him again. He perceived that Italy
was not India, that the clue to the questions he must answer lay in the
crowded new towns that they avoided, in the packed bookshops and the
talk of men, and not