was deader, his features seemed more prominent and his
expression intenser. His eyes were very bright and more sunken under his
brows. He had suffered from yellow fever in the West Indies, and these
it seemed were the marks left by that illness. And he was much more
detached from the people about him; less attentive to the small
incidents of life, more occupied with inner things. He greeted White
with a confidence that White was one day to remember as pathetic.

"It is good to meet an old friend," Benham said. "I have lost friends.
And I do not make fresh ones. I go about too much by myself, and I do
not follow the same tracks that other people are following...."

What track was he following? It was now that White first heard of the
Research Magnificent. He wanted to know what Benham was doing, and
Benham after some partial and unsatisfactory explanation of his interest
in insurgent Hindoos, embarked upon larger expositions. "It is, of
course, a part of something else," he amplified. He was writing a book,
"an enormous sort of book." He laughed with a touch of shyness. It
was about "everything," about how to live and how not to live. And
"aristocracy, and all sorts of things." White was always curious about
other people's books. Benham became earnest and more explicit under
encouragement, and to talk about his book was soon to talk about
himself. In various ways, intentionally and inadvertently, he told White
much. These chance encounters, these intimacies of the train and hotel,
will lead men at times to a stark frankness of statement they would
never permit themselves with habitual friends.

About the Johannesburg labour trouble they talked very little,
considering how insistent it was becoming. But the wide propositions
of the Research Magnificent, with its large indifference to immediate
occurrences, its vast patience, its tremendous expectations, contrasted
very sharply in White's memory with the bitterness, narrowness and
resentment of the events about them. For him the thought of that first
discussion of this vast inchoate book into which Benham's life was
flowering, and which he was ultimately to summarize, trailed with it a
fringe of vivid little pictures; pictures of crowds of men hurrying
on bicycles and afoot under a lowering twilight sky towards murmuring
centres of disorder, of startling flares seen suddenly afar off, of the
muffled galloping of troops through the broad dusty street in the night,
of grou