a time when a woman
misses her husband. But, of course, she does not want to hamper your
work...."

Benham felt it was very kind of him to take so intimate an interest in
these matters, but on the spur of the moment he could find no better
expression for this than a grunt.

"You don't mind," said the young man with a slight catch in the breath
that might have been apprehensive, "that I sometimes bring her books and
flowers and things? Do what little I can to keep life interesting down
here? It's not very congenial.... She's so wonderful--I think she is the
most wonderful woman in the world."

Benham perceived that so far from being a modern aristocrat he was
really a primitive barbarian in these matters.

"I've no doubt," he said, "that my wife has every reason to be grateful
for your attentions."

In the little pause that followed Benham had a feeling that Sir Philip
was engendering something still more personal. If so, he might
be constrained to invert very gently but very firmly the bowl of
chrysanthemums over Sir Philip's head, or kick him in an improving
manner. He had a ridiculous belief that Sir Philip would probably take
anything of the sort very touchingly. He scrambled in his mind for some
remark that would avert this possibility.

"Have you ever been in Russia?" he asked hastily. "It is the most
wonderful country in Europe. I had an odd adventure near Kiev. During a
pogrom."

And he drowned the developing situation in a flood of description....

But it was not so easy to drown the little things that were presently
thrown out by Lady Marayne. They were so much more in the air....

18

Sir Philip suddenly got out of the picture even as Benham had foreseen.

"Easton has gone away," he remarked three days later to Amanda.

"I told him to go. He is a bore with you about. But otherwise he is
rather a comfort, Cheetah." She meditated upon Sir Philip. "And he's an
HONOURABLE man," she said. "He's safe...."

19

After that visit it was that the notes upon love and sex began in
earnest. The scattered memoranda upon the perfectness of heroic love for
the modern aristocrat ended abruptly. Instead there came the first draft
for a study of jealousy. The note was written in pencil on Chexington
notepaper and manifestly that had been supported on the ribbed cover
of a book. There was a little computation in the corner, converting
forty-five degrees Reaumur into degrees Fahrenheit, which made Whi