dear--I'm not your
father, I'm not your judge. I'm--unreasonably fond of you. It's not my
business to settle what is right or wrong for you. If you want to stay
in Moscow, stay in Moscow. Stay here, and stay as my guest...."

He stopped and remained staring at his friend for a little space.

"I didn't know," said Prothero brokenly; "I didn't know it was possible
to get so fond of a person...."

Benham stood up. He had never found Prothero so attractive and so
abominable in his life before.

"I shall go to Odessa alone, Billy. I'll make things all right here
before I go...."

He closed the door behind him and went in a state of profound thought to
his own room....

Presently Prothero came to him with a vague inopportune desire to
explain what so evidently did not need explaining. He walked about the
room trying ways of putting it, while Benham packed.

In an unaccountable way Prothero's bristling little mind seemed to have
shrunken to something sleek and small.

"I wish," he said, "you could stay for a later train and have lunch and
meet her. She's not the ordinary thing. She's--different."

Benham plumbed depths of wisdom. "Billy," he said, "no woman IS the
ordinary thing. They are all--different...."

14

For a time this affair of Prothero's seemed to be a matter as
disconnected from the Research Magnificent as one could imagine any
matter to be. While Benham went from Moscow and returned, and travelled
hither and thither, and involved himself more and more in the endless
tangled threads of the revolutionary movement in Russia, Prothero
was lost to all those large issues in the development of his personal
situation. He contributed nothing to Benham's thought except attempts at
discouragement. He reiterated his declaration that all the vast
stress and change of Russian national life was going on because it was
universally disregarded. "I tell you, as I told you before, that nobody
is attending. You think because all Moscow, all Russia, is in the
picture, that everybody is concerned. Nobody is concerned. Nobody cares
what is happening. Even the men who write in newspapers and talk at
meetings about it don't care. They are thinking of their dinners, of
their clothes, of their money, of their wives. They hurry home...."

That was his excuse.

Manifestly it was an excuse.

His situation developed into remarkable complications of jealousy and
divided counsels that Benham found altogether incomprehensi