“Take her to Cambridge, man.  And if Cambridge objects, teach Cambridge better manners.”

Prothero’s face was suddenly transfigured with rage.

“I tell you she won’t come!” he said.

“Billy!” said Benham, “you should make her!”

“I can’t.”

“If a man loves a woman he can make her do anything—­”

“But I don’t love her like that,” said Prothero, shrill with anger.  “I tell you I don’t love her like that.”

Then he lunged into further deeps.  “It’s the other men,” he said, “it’s the things that have been.  Don’t you understand?  Can’t you understand?  The memories—­she must have memories—­they come between us.  It’s something deeper than reason.  It’s in one’s spine and under one’s nails.  One could do anything, I perceive, for one’s very own woman. . . .”

“Make her your very own woman, said the exponent of heroic love.

“I shirk deeds, Benham, but you shirk facts.  How could any man make her his very own woman now?  You—­you don’t seem to understand—­ anything.  She’s nobody’s woman—­for ever.  That—­that might-have-been has gone for ever. . . .  It’s nerves—­a passion of the nerves.  There’s a cruelty in life and—­ She’s kind to me.  She’s so kind to me. . . .”

And then again Prothero was weeping like a vexed child.

15

The end of Prothero’s first love affair came to Benham in broken fragments in letters.  When he looked for Anna Alexievna in December—­he never learnt her surname—­he found she had left the Cosmopolis Bazaar soon after Prothero’s departure and he could not find whither she had gone.  He never found her again.  Moscow and Russia had swallowed her up.

Of course she and Prothero parted; that was a foregone conclusion.  But Prothero’s manner of parting succeeded in being at every phase a shock to Benham’s ideas.  It was clear he went off almost callously; it would seem there was very little crying.  Towards the end it was evident that the two had quarrelled.  The tears only came at the very end of all.  It was almost as if he had got through the passion and was glad to go.  Then came regret, a regret that increased in geometrical proportion with every mile of distance.

In Warsaw it was that grief really came to Prothero.  He had some hours there and he prowled the crowded streets, seeing girls and women happy with their lovers, abroad upon bright expeditions and full of delicious secrets, girls and women who ever and again flashed out some instant resemblance to Anna. . . .

In Berlin he stopped a night and almost decided that he would go back.  “But now I had the damned frontier,” he wrote, “between us.”

It was so entirely in the spirit of Prothero, Benham thought, to let the “damned frontier” tip the balance against him.