rtache mood, when once she had set him going, then his little mother
also would rise against him, touchingly indignant, with her blue eyes
bright with tears; and his frowsty father would back towards him and
sit down complaining that he was neglected, and even little Mrs.
Skelmersdale would reappear, bravely tearful on her chair looking after
him as he slunk away from her through Kensington Gardens; indeed every
personal link he had ever had to life could in certain moods pull him
back through the door of self-reproach Amanda opened and set him aching
and accusing himself of harshness and self-concentration. The very
kittens of his childhood revived forgotten moments of long-repented
hardness. For a year before Prothero was killed there were these
heartaches. That tragedy gave them their crowning justification. All
these people said in this form or that, "You owed a debt to us, you
evaded it, you betrayed us, you owed us life out of yourself, love and
services, and you have gone off from us all with this life that was
ours, to live by yourself in dreams about the rule of the world,
and with empty phantoms of power and destiny. All this was
intellectualization. You sacrificed us to the thin things of the mind.
There is no rule of the world at all, or none that a man like you
may lay hold upon. The rule of the world is a fortuitous result of
incalculably multitudinous forces. But all of us you could have made
happier. You could have spared us distresses. Prothero died because of
you. Presently it will be the turn of your father, your mother--Amanda
perhaps...."

He made no written note of his heartaches, but he made several memoranda
about priggishness that White read and came near to understanding. In
spite of the tugging at his heart-strings, Benham was making up his mind
to be a prig. He weighed the cold uningratiating virtues of priggishness
against his smouldering passion for Amanda, and against his obstinate
sympathy for Prothero's grossness and his mother's personal pride, and
he made his choice. But it was a reluctant choice.

One fragment began in the air. "Of course I had made myself responsible
for her life. But it was, you see, such a confoundedly energetic life,
as vigorous and as slippery as an eel.... Only by giving all my strength
to her could I have held Amanda.... So what was the good of trying to
hold Amanda?...

"All one's people have this sort of claim upon one. Claims made by their
pride and their