“But Odessa—­Odessa is the centre of interest just now.”

“I want to stay in Moscow.”

Benham looked baffled.

Prothero stuck up his knees and rested his night-shirted arms upon them.  “I don’t want to leave Moscow,” he said, “and I’m not going to do so.”

“But haven’t we done—­”

Prothero interrupted.  “You may.  But I haven’t.  We’re not after the same things.  Things that interest you, Benham, don’t interest me.  I’ve found—­different things.”

His expression was extraordinarily defiant.

“I want,” he went on, “to put our affairs on a different footing.  Now you’ve opened the matter we may as well go into it.  You were good enough to bring me here. . . .  There was a sort of understanding we were working together. . . .  We aren’t. . . .  The long and short of it is, Benham, I want to pay you for my journey here and go on my own—­independently.”

His eye and voice achieved a fierceness that Benham found nearly incredible in him.

Something that had got itself overlooked in the press of other matters jerked back into Benham’s memory.  It popped back so suddenly that for an instant he wanted to laugh.  He turned towards the window, picked his way among Prothero’s carelessly dropped garments, and stood for a moment staring into the square, with its drifting, assembling and dispersing fleet of trains and its long line of blue-coated IZVOSHTCHIKS.  Then he turned.

“Billy,” he said, “didn’t I see you the other evening driving towards the Hermitage?”

“Yes,” said Prothero, and added, “that’s it.”

“You were with a lady.”

“And she is a lady,” said Prothero, so deeply moved that his face twitched as though he was going to weep.

“She’s a Russian?”

“She had an English mother.  Oh, you needn’t stand there and look so damned ironical!  She’s—­she’s a woman.  She’s a thing of kindness. . . .”

He was too full to go on.

“Billy, old boy,” said Benham, distressed, “I don’t want to be ironical—­”

Prothero had got his voice again.

“You’d better know,” he said, “you’d better know.  She’s one of those women who live in this hotel.”

“Live in this hotel!”

“On the fourth floor.  Didn’t you know?  It’s the way in most of these big Russian hotels.  They come down and sit about after lunch and dinner.  A woman with a yellow ticket.  Oh!  I don’t care.  I don’t care a rap.  She’s been kind to me; she’s—­she’s dear to me.  How are you to understand?  I shall stop in Moscow.  I shall take her to England.  I can’t live without her, Benham.  And then—­ And then you come worrying me to come to your damned Odessa!”

And suddenly this extraordinary young man put his hands to his face as though he feared to lose it and would hold it on, and after an apoplectic moment burst noisily into tears.  They ran between his fingers.  “Get out of my room,” he shouted, suffocatingly.  “What business have you to come prying on me?”