hat upward bias would betray him; that from
exaltation he might presently float off, into the higher, the better,
and so to complete unreality. He fled from priggishness and the terror
of such sublimity alike to Prothero. Moreover, in relation to so many
things Prothero in a peculiar distinctive manner SAW. He had less
self-control than Benham, less integrity of purpose, less concentration,
and things that were before his eyes were by the very virtue of these
defects invariably visible to him. Things were able to insist upon
themselves with him. Benham, on the other hand, when facts contradicted
his purpose too stoutly, had a way of becoming blind to them. He
repudiated inconvenient facts. He mastered and made his world; Prothero
accepted and recorded his. Benham was a will towards the universe where
Prothero was a perception and Amanda a confusing responsive activity.
And it was because of his realization of this profound difference
between them that he was possessed by the idea of taking Prothero with
him about the world, as a detachable kind of vision--rather like that
eye the Graiae used to hand one another....

After the busy sunlit streets of Maytime Cambridge, Prothero's rooms in
Trinity, their windows full of Gothic perspectives and light-soaked blue
sky, seemed cool and quiet. A flavour of scholarship pervaded them--a
little blended with the flavour of innumerable breakfasts nearly but not
completely forgotten. Prothero's door had been locked against the world,
and he had appeared after a slight delay looking a little puffy and only
apprehending who his visitor was after a resentful stare for the better
part of a second. He might have been asleep, he might have been doing
anything but the examination papers he appeared to be doing. The two men
exchanged personal details; they had not met since some months before
Benham' s marriage, and the visitor's eye went meanwhile from his host
to the room and back to his host's face as though they were all aspects
of the thing he was after, the Prothero humour, the earthly touch, the
distinctive Prothero flavour. Then his eye was caught by a large red,
incongruous, meretricious-looking volume upon the couch that had an
air of having been flung aside, VENUS IN GEM AND MARBLE, its cover
proclaimed....

His host followed that glance and blushed. "They send me all sorts of
inappropriate stuff to review," he remarked.

And then he was denouncing celibacy.

The transition wa