" said Benham, "is overcharged with this sex. It suffocates
us. It gives life only to consume it. We struggle out of the urgent
necessities of a mere animal existence. We are not so much living as
being married and given in marriage. All life is swamped in the love
story...."

"Man is only overcharged because he is unsatisfied," said Prothero,
sticking stoutly to his own view.

12

It was only as they sat at a little table in the orchard at Grantchester
after their lunch that Benham could make head against Prothero and
recover that largeness of outlook which had so easily touched the
imagination of Amanda. And then he did not so much dispose of Prothero's
troubles as soar over them. It is the last triumph of the human
understanding to sympathize with desires we do not share, and to Benham
who now believed himself to be loved beyond the chances of life, who
was satisfied and tranquil and austerely content, it was impossible
that Prothero's demands should seem anything more than the grotesque and
squalid squealings of the beast that has to be overridden and rejected
altogether. It is a freakish fact of our composition that these most
intense feelings in life are just those that are most rapidly and
completely forgotten; hate one may recall for years, but the magic
of love and the flame of desire serve their purpose in our lives and
vanish, leaving no trace, like the snows of Venice. Benham was still not
a year and a half from the meretricious delights of Mrs. Skelmersdale,
and he looked at Prothero as a marble angel might look at a swine in its
sty....

What he had now in mind was an expedition to Russia. When at last he
could sufficiently release Prothero's attention, he unfolded the project
that had been developing steadily in him since his honeymoon experience.

He had discovered a new reason for travelling. The last country we can
see clearly, he had discovered, is our own country. It is as hard to see
one's own country as it is to see the back of one's head. It is too
much behind us, too much ourselves. But Russia is like England with
everything larger, more vivid, cruder; one felt that directly one walked
about St. Petersburg. St. Petersburg upon its Neva was like a savage
untamed London on a larger Thames; they were seagull-haunted tidal
cities, like no other capitals in Europe. The shipping and buildings
mingled in their effects. Like London it looked over the heads of
its own people to a limitless pol