himself to have injured. With this and a husband already
distinguished, she returned presently to London, and was on the
whole fairly well received there.

It was upon the reverend gentleman at Seagate that the brunt of this
divorce fell. There is perhaps a certain injustice in the fact that
a schoolmaster who has lost his wife should also lose the more
valuable proportion of his pupils, but the tone of thought in
England is against any association of a schoolmaster with
matrimonial irregularity. And also Mr. Benham remarried. It would
certainly have been better for him if he could have produced a
sister. His school declined and his efforts to resuscitate it only
hastened its decay. Conceiving that he could now only appeal to the
broader-minded, more progressive type of parent, he became an
educational reformer, and wrote upon modernizing the curriculum with
increasing frequency to the TIMES. He expended a considerable
fraction of his dwindling capital upon a science laboratory and a
fives court; he added a London Bachelor of Science with a Teaching
Diploma to the school staff, and a library of about a thousand
volumes, including the Hundred Best Books as selected by the late
Lord Avebury, to the school equipment. None of these things did
anything but enhance the suspicion of laxity his wife's escapade had
created in the limited opulent and discreet class to which his
establishment appealed. One boy who, under the influence of the
Hundred Best Books, had quoted the ZEND-AVESTA to an irascible but
influential grandfather, was withdrawn without notice or
compensation in the middle of the term. It intensifies the tragedy
of the Reverend Harold Benham's failure that in no essential respect
did his school depart from the pattern of all other properly-
conducted preparatory schools.