and might leave him disillusioned in the face of a
relationship--

Sometimes a man may be struck by a thought as though he had been struck
in the face, and when the name of Mrs. Skelmersdale came into his head,
he glanced at his wife by his side as if it were something that
she might well have heard. Was this indeed the same thing as that?
Wonderful, fresh as the day of Creation, clean as flame, yet the same!
Was Amanda indeed the sister of Mrs. Skelmersdale--wrought of clean
fire, but her sister?...

But also beside the inimical aspects which could set such doubts afoot
there were in her infinite variety yet other Amandas neither very dear
nor very annoying, but for the most part delightful, who entertained him
as strangers might, Amandas with an odd twist which made them amusing to
watch, jolly Amandas who were simply irrelevant. There was for example
Amanda the Dog Mistress, with an astonishing tact and understanding of
dogs, who could explain dogs and the cock of their ears and the droop of
their tails and their vanity and their fidelity, and why they looked up
and why they suddenly went off round the corner, and their pride in
the sound of their voices and their dastardly thoughts and sniffing
satisfactions, so that for the first time dogs had souls for Benham to
see. And there was an Amanda with a striking passion for the sleekness
and soft noses of horses. And there was an Amanda extremely garrulous,
who was a biographical dictionary and critical handbook to all the girls
in the school she had attended at Chichester--they seemed a very girlish
lot of girls; and an Amanda who was very knowing--knowing was the only
word for it--about pictures and architecture. And these and all the
other Amandas agreed together to develop and share this one quality
in common, that altogether they pointed to no end, they converged on
nothing. She was, it grew more and more apparent, a miscellany bound
in a body. She was an animated discursiveness. That passion to get all
things together into one aristocratic aim, that restraint of purpose,
that imperative to focus, which was the structural essential of Benham's
spirit, was altogether foreign to her composition.

There were so many Amandas, they were as innumerable as the
Venuses--Cytherea, Cypria, Paphia, Popularia, Euploea, Area,
Verticordia, Etaira, Basilea, Myrtea, Libertina, Freya, Astarte,
Philommedis, Telessigamma, Anadyomene, and a thousand others to whom men
have bowed an