he stuffing of the doll. Eyes and heart are her
game. And so there is never any more sphinx in the story than a lady may
impersonate. And as inevitably the heroine meets a man. In his own first
success, White reflected, the hero, before he had gone a dozen pages,
met a very pleasant young woman very pleasantly in a sunlit thicket;
the second opened at once with a bicycle accident that brought two young
people together so that they were never afterwards disentangled;
the third, failing to produce its heroine in thirty pages, had to be
rearranged. The next--

White returned from an unprofitable digression to the matter before him.

14

The first of Benham's early essays was written in an almost boyish hand,
it was youthfully amateurish in its nervous disposition to definitions
and distinctions, and in the elaborate linking of part to part. It was
called TRUE DEMOCRACY. Manifestly it was written before the incident of
the Trinity Hall plates, and most of it had been done after Prothero's
visit to Chexington. White could feel that now inaudible interlocutor.
And there were even traces of Sir Godfrey Marayne's assertion that
democracy was contrary to biology. From the outset it was clear that
whatever else it meant, True Democracy, following the analogy of True
Politeness, True Courage, True Honesty and True Marriage, did not mean
democracy at all. Benham was, in fact, taking Prothero's word, and
trying to impose upon it his own solidifying and crystallizing opinion
of life.

They were not as yet very large or well-formed crystals. The proposition
he struggled to develop was this, that True Democracy did not mean an
equal share in the government, it meant an equal opportunity to share in
the government. Men were by nature and in the most various ways unequal.
True Democracy aimed only at the removal of artificial inequalities....

It was on the truth of this statement, that men were by nature unequal,
that the debate had turned. Prothero was passionately against the idea
at that time. It was, he felt, separating himself from Benham more and
more. He spoke with a personal bitterness. And he found his chief ally
in a rigorous and voluble Frenchman named Carnac, an aggressive Roman
Catholic, who opened his speech by saying that the first aristocrat was
the devil, and shocked Prothero by claiming him as probably the only
other sound Christian in the room. Several biologists were present, and
one tall, fair youth with