the career. Every project was
bright, every project had GO--tremendous go. And they all demanded a
hero, debonnaire and balanced. And Benham, as she began to perceive,
wasn't balanced. Something of his father had crept into him, a touch
of moral stiffness. She knew the flavour of that so well. It was a
stumbling, an elaboration, a spoil-sport and weakness. She tried not to
admit to herself that even in the faintest degree it was there. But it
was there.

"Tell me all that you are doing NOW," she said to him one afternoon when
she had got him to herself during his first visit to Chexington Manor.
"How do you like Cambridge? Are you making friends? Have you joined that
thing--the Union, is it?--and delivered your maiden speech? If you're
for politics, Poff, that's your game. Have you begun it?"

She lay among splashes of sunshine on the red cushions in the punt,
a little curled-up figure of white, with her sweet pale animated face
warmed by the reflection of her red sunshade, and her eyes like little
friendly heavens. And he, lean, and unconsciously graceful, sat at her
feet and admired her beyond measure, and rejoiced that now at last
they were going to be ever so much together, and doubted if it would be
possible ever to love any other woman so much as he did her.

He tried to tell her of Cambridge and his friends and the undergraduate
life he was leading, but he found it difficult. All sorts of things that
seemed right and good at Trinity seemed out of drawing in the
peculiar atmosphere she created about her. All sorts of clumsiness and
youthfulness in himself and his associates he felt she wouldn't accept,
couldn't accept, that it would be wrong of her to accept. Before
they could come before her they must wear a bravery. He couldn't, for
instance, tell her how Billy Prothero, renouncing vanity and all social
pretension, had worn a straw hat into November and the last stages of
decay, and how it had been burnt by a special commission ceremonially in
the great court. He couldn't convey to her the long sessions of beer
and tobacco and high thinking that went on in Prothero's rooms into
the small hours. A certain Gothic greyness and flatness and muddiness
through which the Cambridge spirit struggles to its destiny, he
concealed from her. What remained to tell was--attenuated. He could
not romance. So she tried to fill in his jejune outlines. She tried to
inspire a son who seemed most unaccountably up to nothing.

"Y