e' is
just the unexpurgated egotistical demand coming back again....

"Man is a mating creature. It is not good to be alone. But mating means
a mate....

"We should be lovers, of course; that goes without saying....

"And yet not specialized lovers, not devoted, ATTENDING lovers. 'Dancing
attendance'--as they used to say. We should meet upon our ways as the
great carnivores do....

"That at any rate was a sound idea. Though we only played with it.

"But that mate desire is just a longing that can have no possible
satisfaction now for me. What is the good of dreaming? Life and chance
have played a trick upon my body and soul. I am mated, though I am
mated to a phantom. I loved and I love Arnanda, not Easton's Amanda, but
Amanda in armour, the Amanda of my dreams. Sense, and particularly the
sense of beauty, lies deeper than reason in us. There can be no mate
for me now unless she comes with Amanda's voice and Amanda's face and
Amanda's quick movements and her clever hands...."

24

"Why am I so ungrateful to her still for all the happiness she gave me?

"There were things between us two as lovers,--love, things more
beautiful than anything else in the world, things that set the mind
hunting among ineffectual images in a search for impossible expression,
images of sunlight shining through blood-red petals, images of moonlight
in a scented garden, of marble gleaming in the shade, of far-off
wonderful music heard at dusk in a great stillness, of fairies dancing
softly, of floating happiness and stirring delights, of joys as keen and
sudden as the knife of an assassin, assassin's knives made out of tears,
tears that are happiness, wordless things; and surprises, expectations,
gratitudes, sudden moments of contemplation, the sight of a soft
eyelid closed in sleep, shadowy tones in the sound of a voice heard
unexpectedly; sweet, dear magical things that I can find no words
for....

"If she was a goddess to me, should it be any affair of mine that she
was not a goddess to herself; that she could hold all this that has been
between us more cheaply than I did? It does not change one jot of it for
me. At the time she did not hold it cheaply. She forgets where I do not
forget...."

25

Such were the things that Benham could think and set down.

Yet for whole days he was possessed by the thought of killing Amanda and
himself.

He did not at once turn homeward. It was in Ceylon that he dropped his
work a