ble. To
Benham in those days everything was very simple in this business of
love. The aristocrat had to love ideally; that was all. He had to love
Amanda. He and Amanda were now very deeply in love again, more in
love, he felt, than they had ever been before. They were now writing
love-letters to each other and enjoying a separation that was almost
voluptuous. She found in the epistolatory treatment of her surrender to
him and to the natural fate of women, a delightful exercise for her very
considerable powers of expression. Life pointed now wonderfully to the
great time ahead when there would be a Cheetah cub in the world, and
meanwhile the Cheetah loped about the wild world upon a mighty quest. In
such terms she put it. Such foolishness written in her invincibly square
and youthful hand went daily from London to Russia, and stacked up
against his return in the porter's office at the Cosmopolis Bazaar or
pursued him down through the jarring disorders of south-west Russia, or
waited for him at ill-chosen post-offices that deflected his journeyings
wastefully or in several instances went altogether astray. Perhaps they
supplied self-educating young strikers in the postal service with useful
exercises in the deciphering of manuscript English. He wrote back five
hundred different ways of saying that he loved her extravagantly....

It seemed to Benham in those days that he had found the remedy and
solution of all those sexual perplexities that distressed the world;
Heroic Love to its highest note--and then you go about your business. It
seemed impossible not to be happy and lift one's chin high and diffuse
a bracing kindliness among the unfortunate multitudes who stewed in
affliction and hate because they had failed as yet to find this simple,
culminating elucidation. And Prothero--Prothero, too, was now achieving
the same grand elementariness, out of his lusts and protests and general
physical squalor he had flowered into love. For a time it is true it
made rather an ineffective companion of him, but this was the mere
goose-stepping for the triumphal march; this way ultimately lay
exaltation. Benham had had as yet but a passing glimpse of this
Anglo-Russian, who was a lady and altogether unlike her fellows; he had
seen her for a doubtful second or so as she and Prothero drove past him,
and his impression was of a rather little creature, white-faced with
dusky hair under a red cap, paler and smaller but with something in her