He could as
soon have become a croquet champion or the curate of Chexington
church, lines of endeavour which for him would have led straightly
and simply to sacrilegious scandal or manslaughter with a mallet.
There is so little measure in the wild atonements of the young that
it was perhaps as well for the Research Magnificent that the
remorses of this period of Benham's life were too complicated and
scattered for a cumulative effect. In the background of his mind
and less subdued than its importance could seem to warrant was his
promise to bring the Wilder-Morris people into relations with Lady
Marayne. They had been so delightful to him that he felt quite
acutely the slight he was putting upon them by this delay. Lady
Marayne's moods, however, had been so uncertain that he had found no
occasion to broach this trifling matter, and when at last the
occasion came he perceived in the same instant the fullest reasons
for regretting it.
"Ah!" she said, hanging only for a moment, and then: "you told me
you were alone!" . . .
Her mind leapt at once to the personification of these people as all
that had puzzled and baffled her in her son since his flight from
London.
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