Benham sat down on a chair in the middle of the room and stared round-eyed at his friend.  His hands were in his pockets.  For a time he said nothing.

“Billy,” he began at last, and stopped again.  “Billy, in this country somehow one wants to talk like a Russian.  Billy, my dear—­ I’m not your father, I’m not your judge.  I’m—­unreasonably fond of you.  It’s not my business to settle what is right or wrong for you.  If you want to stay in Moscow, stay in Moscow.  Stay here, and stay as my guest. . . .”

He stopped and remained staring at his friend for a little space.

“I didn’t know,” said Prothero brokenly; “I didn’t know it was possible to get so fond of a person. . . .”

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.  He contributed nothing to Benham’s thought except attempts at discouragement.  He reiterated his declaration that all the vast stress and change of Russian national life was going on because it was universally disregarded.  “I tell you, as I told you before, that nobody is attending.  You think because all Moscow, all Russia, is in the picture, that everybody is concerned.  Nobody is concerned.  Nobody cares what is happening.  Even the men who write in newspapers and talk at meetings about it don’t care.  They are thinking of their dinners, of their clothes, of their money, of their wives.  They hurry home. . . .”

That was his excuse.

Manifestly it was an excuse.