He
might have been asleep, he might have been doing anything but the
examination papers he appeared to be doing. The two men exchanged
personal details; they had not met since some months before Benham'
s marriage, and the visitor's eye went meanwhile from his host to
the room and back to his host's face as though they were all aspects
of the thing he was after, the Prothero humour, the earthly touch,
the distinctive Prothero flavour. Then his eye was caught by a
large red, incongruous, meretricious-looking volume upon the couch
that had an air of having been flung aside, VENUS IN GEM AND MARBLE,
its cover proclaimed. . . .
His host followed that glance and blushed. "They send me all sorts
of inappropriate stuff to review," he remarked.
And then he was denouncing celibacy.
The transition wasn't very clear to Benham. His mind had been
preoccupied by the problem of how to open his own large project.
Meanwhile Prothero got, as it were, the conversational bit between
his teeth and bolted. He began to say the most shocking things
right away, so that Benham's attention was caught in spite of
himself.
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