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Poor, nervous Mrs Prothero, rubbed her hands over one another several times before she had the courage to pick it up, and then she scarcely dared to open it. As she made the attempt, however, a cry of 'Mother! mother! why isn't my breakfast ready? was heard from the foot of the stairs, proceeding from Mr Prothero's lusty voice, who was too proud and too angry to call for Gladys.
He sued for his money, and during the trial the police brought in Prothero's record. Needham let me copy it, and it seems to embrace every crime except treason. The man is a Russian Jew. He was arrested and prosecuted in Warsaw, Vienna, Berlin, Belgrade; all over Europe, until finally the police drove him to America.
"What I really want to do is my work," said Prothero, going off quite unexpectedly again. "That is why all this business, this incessant craving and the shame of it and all makes me so infernally angry...." "There I'm with you," cried Benham, struggling out of the thick torrent of Prothero's prepossessions. "What we want to do is our work." He clung to his idea.
Hunter; "it was not the bets, I never even thought about them it was just because I wanted to see Mr. Prothero's horse win. I never understood before why people should take such an interest in horse racing, but I quite understand now." "What is your size, Miss Hannay?" Wilson asked. "Oh, I don't care anything about the gloves, Mr. Wilson; I am sorry I bet now."
Through stray shots and red conflict, long tediums of strained anxiety and the physical dangers of a barbaric country staggering towards revolution, Benham went with his own love like a lamp within him and this affair of Prothero's reflecting its light, and he was quite prepared for the most sympathetic and liberal behaviour when he came back to Moscow to make the lady's acquaintance.
It was a complicated struggle into which the local foreign traders on the river-front and a detachment of modern drilled troops from the up-river barracks were presently drawn. It was a struggle that was never clearly explained, and at the end of it they found Prothero's body flung out upon a waste place near a little temple on the river bank, stabbed while he was asleep....
He weighed the cold uningratiating virtues of priggishness against his smouldering passion for Amanda, and against his obstinate sympathy for Prothero's grossness and his mother's personal pride, and he made his choice. But it was a reluctant choice. One fragment began in the air. "Of course I had made myself responsible for her life.
Because I know it isn't so...." "Billy," said Benham, "you've the boldest mind that ever I met." Prothero's face lit with satisfaction. Then his countenance fell again. "I know I'm better there," he said, "and yet, see how I let in a whole system of lies to cover my secret humiliations. There, at least, I will cling to pride. I will at least THINK free and clean and high.
'How can I thank you sufficiently? who could think that the child I left twelve years ago would be such a good artist when I returned? But that was the cleverest bit of life-like drawing I ever saw, that sketch of your old pony. By the way, do you know who this is? The colonel opened a sketch-book that he had in his hand, and put it into Freda's. 'Why, this is Gladys, Mrs Prothero's Gladys.
From the outset it was clear that whatever else it meant, True Democracy, following the analogy of True Politeness, True Courage, True Honesty and True Marriage, did not mean democracy at all. Benham was, in fact, taking Prothero's word, and trying to impose upon it his own solidifying and crystallizing opinion of life. They were not as yet very large or well-formed crystals.
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