. . ."
Benham stood up. He had never found Prothero so attractive and so
abominable in his life before.
"I shall go to Odessa alone, Billy. I'll make things all right here
before I go. . . ."
He closed the door behind him and went in a state of profound
thought to his own room. . . .
Presently Prothero came to him with a vague inopportune desire to
explain what so evidently did not need explaining. He walked about
the room trying ways of putting it, while Benham packed.
In an unaccountable way Prothero's bristling little mind seemed to
have shrunken to something sleek and small.
"I wish," he said, "you could stay for a later train and have lunch
and meet her. She's not the ordinary thing. She's--different."
Benham plumbed depths of wisdom. "Billy," he said, "no woman IS the
ordinary thing. They are all--different. . . ."
14
For a time this affair of Prothero's seemed to be a matter as
disconnected from the Research Magnificent as one could imagine any
matter to be. While Benham went from Moscow and returned, and
travelled hither and thither, and involved himself more and more in
the endless tangled threads of the revolutionary movement in Russia,
Prothero was lost to all those large issues in the development of
his personal situation.
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