“Simply I tell you I will not go back to London.”
“I will go back as far as my work calls me there.”
“It calls you through the voice of your mate and slave and doormat to just exactly the sort of house you ought to have.... It is the privilege and duty of the female to choose the lair.”
For a space Benham made no reply. This controversy had been gathering for some time and he wanted to state his view as vividly as possible. The Benham style of connubial conversation had long since decided for emphasis rather than delicacy.
“I think,” he said slowly, “that this wanting to take London by storm is a beastly VULGAR thing to want to do.”
“I want to work out things in my mind,” he went on. “I do not want to be distracted by social things, and I do not want to be distracted by picturesque things. This life--it's all very well on the surface, but it isn't real. I'm not getting hold of reality. Things slip away from me. God! but how they slip away from me!”
He got up and walked to the side of the boat.
She surveyed his back for some moments. Then she went and leant over the rail beside him.
“Where I can see into the things that hold the world together.”
“I have loved this wandering--I could wander always. But... Cheetah! I tell you I WANT to go to London.”
He looked over his shoulder into her warm face. “NO,” he said.
She put her face closer and whispered. “Cheetah! big beast of my heart. Do you hear your mate asking for something?”
He turned his eyes back to the mountains. “I must go my own way.”
“Haven't I, so far, invented things, made life amusing, Cheetah? Can't you trust the leopard's wisdom?”
“You ARE that, Cheetah, that lank, long, EAGER beast--.”
Suddenly with a nimble hand she had unbuttoned and rolled up the sleeve of her blouse. She stuck her pretty blue-veined arm before his eyes. “Look here, sir, it was you, wasn't it? It was your powerful jaw inflicted this bite upon the arm of a defenceless young leopardess--”
He turned about and stood over her, he shook a finger in her face and there was a restrained intensity in his voice as he spoke.
“Look here, Amanda!” he said, “if you think that you are going to make me agree to any sort of project about London, to any sort of complication of our lives with houses in smart streets and a campaign of social assertion--by THAT, then may I be damned for an uxorious fool!”