And as if to emphasize his detachment, his aversion, from the things that hurried through the night about them, from the red flare in the sky and the distant shouts and revolver shots and scuffling flights down side streets, he began to talk again of aristocracy and the making of greatness and a new great spirit in men. All the rest of his life, he said, must be given to that. He would say his thing plainly and honestly and afterwards other men would say it clearly and beautifully; here it would touch a man and there it would touch a man; the Invisible King in us all would find himself and know himself a little in this and a little in that, and at last a day would come, when fair things and fine things would rule the world and such squalor as this about them would be as impossible any more for men as a Stone Age Corroboree.... Late or soon? Benham sought for some loose large measure of time. “Before those constellations above us have changed their shapes.... “Does it matter if we work at something that will take a hundred years or ten thousand years? It will never come in our lives, White. Not soon enough for that. But after that everything will be soon--when one comes to death then everything is at one's fingertips--I can feel that greater world I shall never see as one feels the dawn coming through the last darkness....” 16 The attack on the Rand Club began while Benham and White were at lunch in the dining-room at the Sherborough on the day following the burning of the STAR office. The Sherborough dining-room was on the first floor, and the Venetian window beside their table opened on to a verandah above a piazza. As they talked they became aware of an excitement in the street below, shouting and running and then a sound of wheels and the tramp of a body of soldiers marching quickly. White stood up and looked. “They're seizing the stuff in the gunshops,” he said, sitting down again. “It's amazing they haven't done it before.” They went on eating and discussing the work of a medical mission at Mukden that had won Benham's admiration.... A revolver cracked in the street and there was a sound of glass smashing. Then more revolver shots. “That's at the big club at the corner, I think,” said Benham and went out upon the verandah.