Then came a scrawl of passionate confession, so passionate that it
seemed as if Prothero had been transfigured. "I can't stand this
business," he wrote. "It has things in it, possibilities of
emotional disturbance--you can have no idea! In the train--luckily
I was alone in the compartment--I sat and thought, and suddenly, I
could not help it, I was weeping--noisy weeping, an uproar! A
beastly German came and stood in the corridor to stare. I had to
get out of the train. It is disgraceful, it is monstrous we should
be made like this. . . .
"Here I am stranded in Hanover with nothing to do but to write to
you about my dismal feelings. . . ."
After that surely there was nothing before a broken-hearted Prothero
but to go on with his trailing wing to Trinity and a life of
inappeasable regrets; but again Benham reckoned without the
invincible earthliness of his friend. Prothero stayed three nights
in Paris.
"There is an extraordinary excitement about Paris," he wrote. "A
levity. I suspect the gypsum in the subsoil--some as yet
undescribed radiations.
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