He tried to tell her of Cambridge and his friends and the undergraduate life he was leading, but he found it difficult. All sorts of things that seemed right and good at Trinity seemed out of drawing in the peculiar atmosphere she created about her. All sorts of clumsiness and youthfulness in himself and his associates he felt she wouldn't accept, couldn't accept, that it would be wrong of her to accept. Before they could come before her they must wear a bravery. He couldn't, for instance, tell her how Billy Prothero, renouncing vanity and all social pretension, had worn a straw hat into November and the last stages of decay, and how it had been burnt by a special commission ceremonially in the great court. He couldn't convey to her the long sessions of beer and tobacco and high thinking that went on in Prothero's rooms into the small hours. A certain Gothic greyness and flatness and muddiness through which the Cambridge spirit struggles to its destiny, he concealed from her. What remained to tell was--attenuated. He could not romance. So she tried to fill in his jejune outlines. She tried to inspire a son who seemed most unaccountably up to nothing. “You must make good friends,” she said. “Isn't young Lord Breeze at your college? His mother the other day told me he was. And Sir Freddy Quenton's boy. And there are both the young Baptons at Cambridge.” He knew one of the Baptons. “Poff,” she said suddenly, “has it ever occurred to you what you are going to do afterwards. Do you know you are going to be quite well off?” Benham looked up with a faint embarrassment. “My father said something. He was rather vague. It wasn't his affair--that kind of thing.” “You will be quite well off,” she repeated, without any complicating particulars. “You will be so well off that it will be possible for you to do anything almost that you like in the world. Nothing will tie you. Nothing....” “But--HOW well off?” “You will have several thousands a year.” “Thousands?” “Yes. Why not?” “But--Mother, this is rather astounding.... Does this mean there are estates somewhere, responsibilities?” “It is just money. Investments.” “You know, I've imagined--. I've thought always I should have to DO something.” “You MUST do something, Poff. But it needn't be for a living. The world is yours without that. And so you see you've got to make plans. You've got to know the sort of people who'll have things in their hands. You've got to keep out of--holes and corners. You've got to think of Parliament and abroad. There's the army, there's diplomacy. There's the Empire. You can be a Cecil Rhodes if you like. You can be a Winston....” 5