" Then in an almost
breathless voice, and as if she spoke to herself, "Never in all my
days."
6
It was after that that Amanda began to talk about children. There
was nothing involuntary about Amanda. "Soon," she said, "we must
begin to think of children. Not just now, but a little later. It's
good to travel and have our fun, but life is unreal until there are
children in the background. No woman is really content until she is
a mother. . . ." And for nearly a fortnight nothing more was said
about that solitary journey round the world.
But children were not the only new topic in Amanda's talk. She set
herself with an ingenious subtlety to remind her husband that there
were other men in the world. The convenient fags, sometimes a
little embarrassed, found their inobtrusive services being brought
into the light before Benham's eyes. Most of them were much older
men than himself, elderly philanderers of whom it seemed to him no
sane man need be jealous, men often of forty or more, but one was a
contemporary, Sir Philip Easton, a man with a touch of Spanish blood
and a suggestion of Spanish fire, who quite manifestly was very much
in love with Amanda and of whom she spoke with a slight perceptible
difference of manner that made Benham faintly uneasy.
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