Then came a scrawl of passionate confession, so passionate that it seemed as if Prothero had been transfigured.  “I can’t stand this business,” he wrote.  “It has things in it, possibilities of emotional disturbance—­you can have no idea!  In the train—­luckily I was alone in the compartment—­I sat and thought, and suddenly, I could not help it, I was weeping—­noisy weeping, an uproar!  A beastly German came and stood in the corridor to stare.  I had to get out of the train.  It is disgraceful, it is monstrous we should be made like this. . . .

“Here I am stranded in Hanover with nothing to do but to write to you about my dismal feelings. . . .”

After that surely there was nothing before a broken-hearted Prothero but to go on with his trailing wing to Trinity and a life of inappeasable regrets; but again Benham reckoned without the invincible earthliness of his friend.  Prothero stayed three nights in Paris.

“There is an extraordinary excitement about Paris,” he wrote.  “A levity.  I suspect the gypsum in the subsoil—­some as yet undescribed radiations.  Suddenly the world looks brightly cynical. . . .  None of those tear-compelling German emanations. . . .

“And, Benham, I have found a friend.

“A woman.  Of course you will laugh, you will sneer.  You do not understand these things. . . .  Yet they are so simple.  It was the strangest accident brought us together.  There was something that drew us together.  A sort of instinct.  Near the Boulevard Poissoniere. . . .”

“Good heavens!” said Benham.  “A sort of instinct!”

“I told her all about Anna!”

“Good Lord!” cried Benham.

“She understood.  Perfectly.  None of your so-called ‘respectable’ women could have understood. . . .  At first I intended merely to talk to her. . . .”

Benham crumpled the letter in his hand.

“Little Anna Alexievna!” he said, “you were too clean for him.”

16

Benham had a vision of Prothero returning from all this foreign travel meekly, pensively, a little sadly, and yet not without a kind of relief, to the grey mildness of Trinity.  He saw him, capped and gowned, and restored to academic dignity again, nodding greetings, resuming friendships.

The little man merged again into his rare company of discreet Benedicts and restrained celibates at the high tables.  They ate on in their mature wisdom long after the undergraduates had fled.  Presently they would withdraw processionally to the combination room. . . .

There would be much to talk about over the wine.

Benham speculated what account Prothero would give of Moscow. . . .

He laughed abruptly.

And with that laugh Prothero dropped out of Benham’s world for a space of years.  There may have been other letters, but if so they were lost in the heaving troubles of a revolution-strained post-office.  Perhaps to this day they linger sere and yellow in some forgotten pigeon-hole in Kishinev or Ekaterinoslav. . . .