s with riches at large in the
world have some such perplexity as this mixed in with the gift. Such men
as the Cecils perhaps not, because they are in the order of things, the
rich young Jews perhaps not, because acquisition is their principle,
but for most other intelligent inheritors there must be this twinge of
conscientious doubt. "Why particularly am I picked out for so tremendous
an advantage?" If the riddle is not Nolan, then it is rent, or it is the
social mischief of the business, or the particular speculative COUP that
established their fortune.

"PECUNIA NON OLET," Benham wrote, "and it is just as well. Or the
west-ends of the world would reek with deodorizers. Restitution is
inconceivable; how and to whom? And in the meanwhile here we are lifted
up by our advantage to a fantastic appearance of opportunity. Whether
the world looks to us or not to do tremendous things, it ought to look
to us. And above all we ought to look to ourselves. RICHESSE OBLIGE."

3

It is not to be supposed that Benham came to town only with a general
theory of aristocracy. He had made plans for a career. Indeed, he had
plans for several careers. None of them when brought into contrast with
the great spectacle of London retained all the attractiveness that had
saturated them at their inception.

They were all more or less political careers. Whatever a democratic man
may be, Prothero and he had decided that an aristocratic man is a public
man. He is made and protected in what he is by laws and the state and
his honour goes out to the state. The aristocrat has no right to be
a voluptuary or a mere artist or a respectable nonentity, or any such
purely personal things. Responsibility for the aim and ordering of the
world is demanded from him as imperatively as courage.

Benham's deliberate assumption of the equestrian role brought him
into contact with a new set of acquaintances, conscious of political
destinies. They were amiable, hard young men, almost affectedly
unaffected; they breakfasted before dawn to get in a day's hunting, and
they saw to it that Benham's manifest determination not to discredit
himself did not lead to his breaking his neck. Their bodies were
beautifully tempered, and their minds were as flabby as Prothero's body.
Among them were such men as Lord Breeze and Peter Westerton, and that
current set of Corinthians who supposed themselves to be resuscitating
the Young England movement and Tory Democracy. Poor