He was a tall man with lack-lustre eyes and sunken
cheeks that made his cheek bones very prominent, and gave his thin-
lipped mouth something of the geniality of a skull, and the arm he
thrust out of his yellow robe to hand Prothero's message to Benham
was lean as a pole. So he stood out in White's imagination, against
the warm afternoon sky and the brown roofs and blue haze of the
great town below, and was with one exception the distinctest thing
in the story. The message he bore was scribbled by Prothero himself
in a nerveless scrawl: "Send a hundred dollars by this man. I am in
a frightful fix."
Now Benham's host had been twitting him with the European patronage
of opium, and something in this message stirred his facile
indignation. Twice before he had had similar demands. And on the
whole they had seemed to him to be unreasonable demands. He was
astonished that while he was sitting and talking of the great world-
republic of the future and the secret self-directed aristocracy that
would make it possible, his own friend, his chosen companion, should
thus, by this inglorious request and this ungainly messenger,
disavow him.
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