第54章 CHAPTER THE THIRD(10)

It is remarkable, White reflected, as he turned over the abundant but confused notes upon this perplexing phase of Benham's development that lay in the third drawer devoted to the Second Limitation, how dependent human beings are upon statement.Man is the animal that states a case.He lives not in things but in expressed ideas, and what was troubling Benham inordinately that night, a night that should have been devoted to purely blissful and exalted expectations, was the sheer impossibility of stating what had happened in any terms that would be tolerable either to Mrs.

Skelmersdale or Lady Marayne.The thing had happened with the suddenness of a revelation.Whatever had been going on in the less illuminated parts of his mind, his manifest resolution had been merely to bid South Harting good-bye-- And in short they would never understand.They would accuse him of the meanest treachery.

He could see his mother's face, he could hear her voice saying, "And so because of this sudden infatuation for a swindler's daughter, a girl who runs about the roads with a couple of retrievers hunting for a man, you must spoil all my plans, ruin my year, tell me a lot of pretentious stuffy lies...." And Mrs.Skelmersdale too would say, "Of course he just talked of the world and duty and all that rubbish to save my face...."It wasn't so at all.

But it looked so frightfully like it!

Couldn't they realize that he had fled out of London before ever he had seen Amanda? They might be able to do it perhaps, but they never would.It just happened that in the very moment when the edifice of his noble resolutions had been ready, she had stepped into it--out of nothingness and nowhere.She wasn't an accident;that was just the point upon which they were bound to misjudge her;she was an embodiment.If only he could show her to them as she had first shown herself to him, swift, light, a little flushed from running but not in the least out of breath, quick as a leopard upon the dogs....But even if the improbable opportunity arose, he perceived it might still be impossible to produce the Amanda he loved, the Amanda of the fluttering short skirt and the clear enthusiastic voice.Because, already he knew she was not the only Amanda.There was another, there might be others, there was this perplexing person who had flashed into being at the very moment of their mutual confession, who had produced the entirely disconcerting demand that nobody must be told.Then Betty had intervened.But that sub-Amanda and her carneying note had to be dealt with on the first occasion, because when aristocrats love they don't care a rap who is told and who is not told.They just step out into the light side by side....

"Don't tell any one," she had said, "not for a few days...."This sub-Amanda was perceptible next morning again, flitting about in the background of a glad and loving adventuress, a pre-occupied Amanda who had put her head down while the real Amanda flung her chin up and contemplated things on the Asiatic scale, and who was apparently engaged in disentangling something obscure connected with Mr.Rathbone-Sanders that ought never to have been entangled....