be their master-slaves and
keepers? But it was not simply that Benham felt men must be freed from
this incessant attendance; women too must free themselves from their
almost instinctive demand for an attendant....

His innate disposition was to treat women as responsible beings. Never
in his life had he thought of a woman as a pretty thing to be fooled and
won and competed for and fought over. So that it was Amanda he wanted
to reach and reckon with now, Amanda who had mated and ruled his senses
only to fling him into this intolerable pit of shame and jealous fury.
But the forces that were driving him home now were the forces below the
level of reason and ideas, organic forces compounded of hate and desire,
profound aboriginal urgencies. He thought, indeed, very little as he
lay in his berth or sulked on deck; his mind lay waste under a pitiless
invasion of exasperating images that ever and again would so wring him
that his muscles would tighten and his hands clench or he would find
himself restraining a snarl, the threat of the beast, in his throat.

Amanda grew upon his imagination until she overshadowed the whole world.
She filled the skies. She bent over him and mocked him. She became a
mystery of passion and dark beauty. She was the sin of the world. One
breathed her in the winds of the sea. She had taken to herself the
greatness of elemental things....

So that when at last he saw her he was amazed to see her, and see that
she was just a creature of common size and quality, a rather tired and
very frightened-looking white-faced young woman, in an evening-dress of
unfamiliar fashion, with little common trinkets of gold and colour about
her wrists and neck.

In that instant's confrontation he forgot all that had brought him
homeward. He stared at her as one stares at a stranger whom one has
greeted in mistake for an intimate friend.

For he saw that she was no more the Amanda he hated and desired to kill
than she had ever been the Amanda he had loved.

27

He took them by surprise. It had been his intention to take them by
surprise. Such is the inelegance of the jealous state.

He reached London in the afternoon and put up at a hotel near Charing
Cross. In the evening about ten he appeared at the house in Lancaster
Gate. The butler was deferentially amazed. Mrs. Benham was, he said, at
a theatre with Sir Philip Easton, and he thought some other people also.
He did not know when she would be back. She