Like so many clergymen and
schoolmasters, he had early distrusted his natural impulse in
conversation, and had adopted the defensive precaution of a rather
formal and sonorous speech, which habit had made a part of him. His
general effect was of one who is earnestly keeping up things that
might otherwise give way, keeping them up by act and voice, keeping
up an atmosphere of vigour and success in a school that was only too
manifestly attenuated, keeping up a pretentious economy of
administration in a school that must not be too manifestly
impoverished, keeping up a claim to be in the scientific van and
rather a flutterer of dovecots--with its method of manual training
for example--keeping up ESPRIT DE CORPS and the manliness of himself
and every one about him, keeping up his affection for his faithful
second wife and his complete forgetfulness of and indifference to
that spirit of distracting impulse and insubordination away there in
London, who had once been his delight and insurmountable difficulty.
"After my visits to her," wrote Benham, "he would show by a hundred
little expressions and poses and acts how intensely he wasn't noting
that anything of the sort had occurred.
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