It was Prothero's eyes and pencil that first directed Benham to the poor indolences and evasions and insincerities of the masters.It was Prothero's wicked pictures that made him see the shrivelled absurdity of the vulgar theology.But it was Benham who stood between Prothero and that rather coarsely conceived epicureanism that seemed his logical destiny.When quite early in their Cambridge days Prothero's revolt against foppery reached a nadir of personal neglect, and two philanthropists from the rooms below him, goaded beyond the normal tolerance of Trinity, and assisted by two sportsmen from Trinity Hall, burnt his misshapen straw hat (after partly filling it with gunpowder and iron filings) and sought to duck him in the fountain in the court, it was Benham, in a state between distress and madness, and armed with a horn-handled cane of exceptional size, who intervened, turned the business into a blend of wrangle and scuffle, introduced the degrading topic of duelling into a simple wholesome rag of four against one, carried him off under the cloud of horror created by this impropriety and so saved him, still only slightly wetted, not only from this indignity but from the experiment in rationalism that had provoked it.
Because Benham made it perfectly clear what he had thought and felt about this hat.
Such was the illuminating young man whom Lady Marayne decided to invite to Chexington, into the neighbourhood of herself, Sir Godfrey, and her circle of friends.
7
He was quite anxious to satisfy the requirements of Benham's people and to do his friend credit.He was still in the phase of being a penitent pig, and he inquired carefully into the needs and duties of a summer guest in a country house.He knew it was quite a considerable country house, and that Sir Godfrey wasn't Benham's father, but like most people, he was persuaded that Lady Marayne had divorced the parental Benham.He arrived dressed very neatly in a brown suit that had only one fault, it had not the remotest suggestion of having been made for him.It fitted his body fairly well, it did annex his body with only a few slight incompatibilities, but it repudiated his hands and face.He had a conspicuously old Gladstone bag and a conspicuously new despatch case, and he had forgotten black ties and dress socks and a hair brush.He arrived in the late afternoon, was met by Benham, in tennis flannels, looking smartened up and a little unfamiliar, and taken off in a spirited dog-cart driven by a typical groom.He met his host and hostess at dinner.
Sir Godfrey was a rationalist and a residuum.Very much of him, too much perhaps, had gone into the acquirement and perfect performance of the caecal operation; the man one met in the social world was what was left over.It had the effect of being quiet, but in its unobtrusive way knobby.He had a knobby brow, with an air about it of having recently been intent, and his conversation was curiously spotted with little knobby arrested anecdotes.If any one of any distinction was named, he would reflect and say, "Of course,--ah, yes, I know him, I know him.Yes, I did him a little service--in ‘96."And something in his manner would suggest a satisfaction, or a dissatisfaction with confidential mysteries.
He welcomed Billy Prothero in a colourless manner, and made conversation about Cambridge.He had known one or two of the higher dons.One he had done at Cambridge quite recently."The inns are better than they are at Oxford, which is not saying very much, but the place struck me as being changed.The men seemed younger...."The burden of the conversation fell upon Lady Marayne.She looked extraordinarily like a flower to Billy, a little diamond buckle on a black velvet band glittered between the two masses of butter-coloured hair that flowed back from her forehead, her head was poised on the prettiest neck conceivable, and her shapely little shoulders and her shapely little arms came decidedly but pleasantly out of a softness and sparkle of white and silver and old rose.She talked what sounded like innocent commonplaces a little spiced by whim, though indeed each remark had an exploratory quality, and her soft blue eyes rested ever and again upon Billy's white tie.It seemed she did so by the merest inadvertency, but it made the young man wish he had after all borrowed a black one from Benham.But the manservant who had put his things out had put it out, and he hadn't been quite sure.Also she noted all the little things he did with fork and spoon and glass.She gave him an unusual sense of being brightly, accurately and completely visible.
Chexington, it seemed to Billy, was done with a large and costly and easy completeness.The table with its silver and flowers was much more beautifully done than any table he had sat at before, and in the dimness beyond the brightness there were two men to wait on the four of them.The old grey butler was really wonderfully good....
"You shoot, Mr.Prothero?"
"You hunt, Mr.Prothero?"
"You know Scotland well, Mr.Prothero?"
These questions disturbed Prothero.He did not shoot, he did not hunt, he did not go to Scotland for the grouse, he did not belong, and Lady Marayne ought to have seen that he did not belong to the class that does these things.
"You ride much, Mr.Prothero?"
Billy conceived a suspicion that these innocent inquiries were designed to emphasize a contrast in his social quality.But he could not be sure.One never could be sure with Lady Marayne.It might be just that she did not understand the sort of man he was.
