istocrat cannot be a lover."

"One cannot serve at once the intricacies of the wider issues of life
and the intricacies of another human being. I do not mean that one may
not love. One loves the more because one does not concentrate one's
love. One loves nations, the people passing in the street, beasts hurt
by the wayside, troubled scoundrels and university dons in tears....

"But if one does not give one's whole love and life into a woman's hands
I do not think one can expect to be loved.

"An aristocrat must do without close personal love...."

This much was written at the top of a sheet of paper. The writing ended
halfway down the page. Manifestly it was an abandoned beginning. And it
was, it seemed to White, the last page of all this confusion of matter
that dealt with the Second and Third Limitations. Its incompleteness
made its expression perfect....

There Benham's love experience ended. He turned to the great business
of the world. Desire and Jealousy should deflect his life no more; like
Fear they were to be dismissed as far as possible and subdued when
they could not be altogether dismissed. Whatever stirrings of blood or
imagination there were in him after that parting, whatever failures from
this resolution, they left no trace on the rest of his research, which
was concerned with the hates of peoples and classes and war and peace
and the possibilities science unveils and starry speculations of what
mankind may do.

32

But Benham did not leave England again until he had had an encounter
with Lady Marayne.

The little lady came to her son in a state of extraordinary anger and
distress. Never had she seemed quite so resolute nor quite so hopelessly
dispersed and mixed. And when for a moment it seemed to him that she was
not as a matter of fact dispersed and mixed at all, then with an instant
eagerness he dismissed that one elucidatory gleam. "What are you doing
in England, Poff?" she demanded. "And what are you going to do?

"Nothing! And you are going to leave her in your house, with your
property and a lover. If that's it, Poff, why did you ever come back?
And why did you ever marry her? You might have known; her father was a
swindler. She's begotten of deceit. She'll tell her own story while you
are away, and a pretty story she'll make of it."

"Do you want me to divorce her and make a scandal?"

"I never wanted you to go away from her. If you'd stayed and watched her
as a man should, as