living the aristocratic life, which takes all the coarse simplicity out of this business. If it was only submission. . . . YOU think it is only submission–giving way. . . . It isn’t only submission. We’d manage sex all right,custom usb flash drives, we’d be the happy swine our senses would make us, if we didn’t know all the time that there was something else to live for, something far more important. And different. Absolutely different and contradictory. So different that it cuts right across all these considerations. It won’t fit in. . . . I don’t know what this other thing is; it’s what I want to talk about with you. But I know that it IS,custom usb drives, in all my bones. . . . YOU know. . . . It demands control, it demands continence, it insists upon disregard.” But the ideas of continence and disregard were unpleasant ideas to Prothero that day. “Mankind,” said Benham,custom usb, “is overcharged with this sex. It suffocates us. It gives life only to consume it. We struggle out of the urgent necessities of a mere animal existence. We are not so much living as being married and given in marriage. All life is swamped in the love story. . . .” “Man is only overcharged because he is unsatisfied,” said Prothero, sticking stoutly to his own view.
12
It was only as they sat at a little table in the orchard at Grantchester after their lunch that Benham could make head against Prothero and recover that largeness of outlook which had so easily touched the imagination of Amanda. And then he did not so much dispose of Prothero’s troubles as soar over them. It is the last triumph of the human understanding to sympathize with desires we do not share, and to Benham who now believed himself to be loved beyond the chances of life, who was satisfied and tranquil and austerely content, it was impossible that Prothero’s demands should seem anything more than the grotesque and squalid squealings of the beast that has to be overridden and rejected altogether. It is a freakish fact of our composition that these most intense feelings in life are just those that are most rapidly and completely forgotten; hate one may recall for years, but the magic of love and the flame of desire serve their purpose in our lives and vanish, leaving no trace, like the snows of Venice. Benham was still not a year and a half from the meretricious delights of Mrs. Skelmersdale, and he looked at Prothero as a marble angel might look at a swine in its sty. . . . What he had now in mind was an expedition to Russia. When at l