.
At first after his parting from Amanda in London Benham had felt
completely justified in his treatment of her. She had betrayed him
and he had behaved, he felt, with dignity and self-control. He had
no doubt that he had punished her very effectively, and it was only
after he had been travelling in China with Prothero for some time
and in the light of one or two chance phrases in her letters that he
began to have doubts whether he ought to have punished her at all.
And one night at Shanghai he had a dream in which she stood before
him, dishevelled and tearful, his Amanda, very intensely his Amanda,
and said that she was dirty and shameful and spoilt for ever,
because he had gone away from her. Afterwards the dream became
absurd: she showed him the black leopard's fur as though it was a
rug, and it was now moth-eaten and mangey, the leopard skin that had
been so bright and wonderful such a little time ago, and he awoke
before he could answer her, and for a long time he was full of
unspoken answers explaining that in view of her deliberate
unfaithfulness the position she took up was absurd.
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