the contents of a man's head. That is just the stuffing of the
doll. Eyes and heart are her game. And so there is never any more
sphinx in the story than a lady may impersonate. And as inevitably
the heroine meets a man. In his own first success, White reflected,
the hero, before he had gone a dozen pages, met a very pleasant
young woman very pleasantly in a sunlit thicket; the second opened
at once with a bicycle accident that brought two young people
together so that they were never afterwards disentangled; the third,
failing to produce its heroine in thirty pages, had to be
rearranged. The next--

White returned from an unprofitable digression to the matter before
him.



14


The first of Benham's early essays was written in an almost boyish
hand, it was youthfully amateurish in its nervous disposition to
definitions and distinctions, and in the elaborate linking of part
to part. It was called TRUE DEMOCRACY. Manifestly it was written
before the incident of the Trinity Hall plates, and most of it had
been done after Prothero's visit to Chexington. White could feel
that now inaudible interlocutor. And there were even traces of Sir
Godfrey Marayne's assertion that democracy was contrary to biology.
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.