he was a liberal and
understanding purchaser of the ascendant painters; he understood
that side of Amanda's interests, a side upon which Benham was notably
deficient....

"Amanda seems to like that dark boy, Poff; what is his name?--Sir Philip
Easton?" said Lady Marayne.

Benham looked at her with a slightly hostile intelligence, and said
nothing.

"When a man takes a wife, he has to keep her," said Lady Marayne.

"No," said Benham after consideration. "I don't intend to be a
wife-herd."

"What?"

"Wife-herd--same as goat-herd."

"Coarse, you are sometimes, Poff--nowadays."

"It's exactly what I mean. I can understand the kind of curator's
interest an Oriental finds in shepherding a large establishment, but
to spend my days looking after one person who ought to be able to look
after herself--"

"She's very young."

"She's quite grown up. Anyhow I'm not a moral nursemaid."

"If you leave her about and go abroad--"

"Has she been talking to you, mother?"

"The thing shows."

"But about my going abroad?"

"She said something, my little Poff."

Lady Marayne suddenly perceived that beneath Benham's indifference
was something strung very tight, as though he had been thinking
inordinately. He weighed his words before he spoke again. "If Amanda
chooses to threaten me with a sort of conditional infidelity, I don't
see that it ought to change the plans I have made for my life...."

7

"No aristocrat has any right to be jealous," Benham wrote. "If he
chances to be mated with a woman who does not see his vision or
naturally go his way, he has no right to expect her, much less to compel
her to go his way. What is the use of dragging an unwilling companion
through morasses of uncongenial thought to unsought ends? What is the
use of dragging even a willing pretender, who has no inherent will to
seek and live the aristocratic life?

"But that does not excuse him from obedience to his own call...."

He wrote that very early in his examination of the Third Limitation.
Already he had thought out and judged Amanda. The very charm of her,
the sweetness, the nearness and magic of her, was making him more grimly
resolute to break away. All the elaborate process of thinking her
over had gone on behind the mask of his silences while she had been
preoccupied with her housing and establishment in London; it was with a
sense of extraordinary injustice, of having had a march stolen upon her,
of being unfairly trap