nt of her. She had betrayed him and
he had behaved, he felt, with dignity and self-control. He had no doubt
that he had punished her very effectively, and it was only after he had
been travelling in China with Prothero for some time and in the light
of one or two chance phrases in her letters that he began to have doubts
whether he ought to have punished her at all. And one night at Shanghai
he had a dream in which she stood before him, dishevelled and tearful,
his Amanda, very intensely his Amanda, and said that she was dirty
and shameful and spoilt for ever, because he had gone away from her.
Afterwards the dream became absurd: she showed him the black leopard's
fur as though it was a rug, and it was now moth-eaten and mangey, the
leopard skin that had been so bright and wonderful such a little time
ago, and he awoke before he could answer her, and for a long time he
was full of unspoken answers explaining that in view of her deliberate
unfaithfulness the position she took up was absurd. She had spoilt her
own fur. But what was more penetrating and distressing in this dream was
not so much the case Amanda stated as the atmosphere of unconquerable
intimacy between them, as though they still belonged to each other,
soul to soul, as though nothing that had happened afterwards could have
destroyed their common responsibility and the common interest of their
first unstinted union. She was hurt, and of course he was hurt. He began
to see that his marriage to Amanda was still infinitely more than a
technical bond.

And having perceived that much he presently began to doubt whether she
realized anything of the sort. Her letters fluctuated very much in tone,
but at times they were as detached and guarded as a schoolgirl writing
to a cousin. Then it seemed to Benham an extraordinary fraud on her
part that she should presume to come into his dream with an entirely
deceptive closeness and confidence. She began to sound him in these
latter letters upon the possibility of divorce. This, which he had been
quite disposed to concede in London, now struck him as an outrageous
suggestion. He wrote to ask her why, and she responded exasperatingly
that she thought it was "better." But, again, why better? It is
remarkable that although his mind had habituated itself to the idea that
Easton was her lover in London, her thought of being divorced, no doubt
to marry again, filled him with jealous rage. She asked him to take
the blame in the di