But Benham was always a Cheetah. That had come
to her as a revelation from heaven. But so clearly he was a
Cheetah. He was a Hunting Leopard; the only beast that has an up-
cast face and dreams and looks at you with absent-minded eyes like a
man. She laced their journeys with a fantastic monologue telling in
the third person what the Leopard and the Cheetah were thinking and
seeing and doing. And so they walked up mountains and over passes
and swam in the warm clear water of romantic lakes and loved each
other mightily always, in chestnut woods and olive orchards and
flower-starred alps and pine forests and awning-covered boats, and
by sunset and moonlight and starshine; and out of these agreeable
solitudes they came brown and dusty, striding side by side into
sunlit entertaining fruit-piled market-places and envious hotels.
For days and weeks together it did not seem to Benham that there was
anything that mattered in life but Amanda and the elemental joys of
living. And then the Research Magnificent began to stir in him
again. He perceived that Italy was not India, that the clue to the
questions he must answer lay in the crowded new towns that they
avoided, in the packed bookshops and the talk of men, and not in the
picturesque and flowery solitudes to which their lovemaking carried
them.
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