“I want,” he went on, “to put our affairs on a different footing. Now you've opened the matter we may as well go into it. You were good enough to bring me here.... There was a sort of understanding we were working together.... We aren't.... The long and short of it is, Benham, I want to pay you for my journey here and go on my own—independently.”
His eye and voice achieved a fierceness that Benham found nearly incredible in him.
Something that had got itself overlooked in the press of other matters jerked back into Benham's memory. It popped back so suddenly that for an instant he wanted to laugh. He turned towards the window, picked his way among Prothero's carelessly dropped garments, and stood for a moment staring into the square, with its drifting, assembling and dispersing fleet of trains and its long line of blue-coated IZVOSHTCHIKS. Then he turned.
“Billy,” he said, “didn't I see you the other evening driving towards the Hermitage?”
“Yes,” said Prothero, and added, “that's it.”
“You were with a lady.”
“And she IS a lady,” said Prothero, so deeply moved that his face twitched as though he was going to weep.
“She's a Russian?”
“She had an English mother. Oh, you needn't stand there and look so damned ironical! She's—she's a woman. She's a thing of kindness....”
He was too full to go on.