d built temples, a thousand and the same, and yet it seemed
to Benham there was still one wanting.

The Amanda he had loved most wonderfully was that Amanda in armour who
had walked with him through the wilderness of the world along the road
to Chichester--and that Amanda came back to him no more.

5

Amanda too was making her observations and discoveries.

These moods of his perplexed her; she was astonished to find he was
becoming irritable; she felt that he needed a firm but gentle discipline
in his deportment as a lover. At first he had been perfect....

But Amanda was more prepared for human inconsecutiveness than Benham,
because she herself was inconsecutive, and her dissatisfaction with his
irritations and preoccupation broadened to no general discontent. He had
seemed perfect and he wasn't. So nothing was perfect. And he had to
be managed, just as one must manage a dog or a cousin or a mother or a
horse. Anyhow she had got him, she had no doubt that she held him by a
thousand ties, the spotless leopard had him between her teeth, he was a
prisoner in the dusk of her hair, and the world was all one vast promise
of entertainment.

6

But the raid into the Balkans was not the tremendous success she had
expected it to be. They had adventures, but they were not the richly
coloured, mediaeval affairs she had anticipated. For the most part until
Benham broke loose beyond Ochrida they were adventures in discomfort. In
those remote parts of Europe inns die away and cease, and it had never
occurred to Amanda that inns could die away anywhere. She had thought
that they just became very simple and natural and quaint. And she had
thought that when benighted people knocked at a door it would presently
open hospitably. She had not expected shots at random from the window.
And it is not usual in Albania generally for women, whether they are
Christian or Moslem, to go about unveiled; when they do so it leads
to singular manifestations. The moral sense of the men is shocked and
staggered, and they show it in many homely ways. Small boys at that
age when feminine beauty does not yet prevail with them, pelt. Also
in Mahometan districts they pelt men who do not wear fezzes, while
occasionally Christians of the shawl-headed or skull-cap persuasions
will pelt a fez. Sketching is always a peltable or mobable offence,
as being contrary to the Koran, and sitting down tempts the pelter.
Generally they pelt. The dogs of