“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....
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....”
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 White guess it had been written in the Red Sea. But, indeed, it had been written in a rather amateurishly stoked corridor-train on Benham's journey to the gathering revolt in Moscow....
“I think I have been disposed to underrate the force of sexual jealousy.... I thought it was something essentially contemptible, something that one dismissed and put behind oneself in the mere effort to be aristocratic, but I begin to realize that it is not quite so easily settled with....
“One likes to know.... Possibly one wants to know too much.... In phases of fatigue, and particularly in phases of sleeplessness, when one is leaving all that one cares for behind, it becomes an irrational torment....
“And it is not only in oneself that I am astonished by the power of this base motive. I see, too, in the queer business of Prothero how strongly jealousy, how strongly the sense of proprietorship, weighs with a man....
“There is no clear reason why one should insist upon another human being being one's ownest own--utterly one's own....
“There is, of course, no clear reason for most human motives....
