yglot empire. And Russia was an
aristocratic land, with a middle-class that had no pride in itself as a
class; it had a British toughness and incompetence, a British disregard
of logic and meticulous care. Russia, like England, was outside Catholic
Christendom, it had a state church and the opposition to that church was
not secularism but dissent. One could draw a score of such contrasted
parallels. And now it was in a state of intolerable stress, that laid
bare the elemental facts of a great social organization. It was having
its South African war, its war at the other end of the earth, with a
certain defeat instead of a dubious victory....

"There is far more freedom for the personal life in Russia than in
England," said Prothero, a little irrelevantly.

Benham went on with his discourse about Russia....

"At the college of Troitzka," said Prothero, "which I understand is a
kind of monster Trinity unencumbered by a University, Binns tells me
that although there is a profession of celibacy within the walls, the
arrangements of the town and more particularly of the various hotels are
conceived in a spirit of extreme liberality."

Benham hardly attended at all to these interruptions.

He went on to point out the elemental quality of the Russian situation.
He led up to the assertion that to go to Russia, to see Russia, to try
to grasp the broad outline of the Russian process, was the manifest duty
of every responsible intelligence that was free to do as much. And so he
was going, and if Prothero cared to come too--

"Yes," said Prothero, "I should like to go to Russia."

13

But throughout all their travel together that summer Benham was never
able to lift Prothero away from his obsession. It was the substance of
their talk as the Holland boat stood out past waiting destroyers and
winking beacons and the lights of Harwich, into the smoothly undulating
darkness of the North Sea; it rose upon them again as they sat over
the cakes and cheese of a Dutch breakfast in the express for Berlin.
Prothero filled the Sieges Allee with his complaints against nature
and society, and distracted Benham in his contemplation of Polish
agriculture from the windows of the train with turgid sexual liberalism.
So that Benham, during this period until Prothero left him and until
the tragic enormous spectacle of Russia in revolution took complete
possession of him, was as it were thinking upon two floors. Upon the one
he was think