Benham was tremendously
in love with her most of the time, but one day when they were
sitting over the Findelen glacier his perceptions blundered for the
first time upon the fundamental antagonism of their quality. She
was sketching out jolly things that they were to do together,
expeditions, entertainments, amusements, and adventures, with a
voluble swiftness, and suddenly in a flash his eyes were opened, and
he saw that she would never for a moment feel the quality that made
life worth while for him. He saw it in a flash, and in that flash
he made his urgent resolve not to see it. From that moment forth
his bearing was poisoned by his secret determination not to think of
this, not to admit it to his mind. And forbidden to come into his
presence in its proper form, this conflict of intellectual
temperaments took on strange disguises, and the gathering tension of
his mind sought to relieve itself along grotesque irrelevant
channels.
There was, for example, the remarkable affair of the drive from
Macugnaga to Piedimulera.
They had decided to walk down in a leisurely fashion, but with the
fatigues of the precipitous clamber down from Switzerland still upon
them they found the white road between rock above and gorge below
wearisome, and the valley hot in the late morning sunshine, and
already before they reached the inn they had marked for lunch Amanda
had suggested driving the rest of the way.
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