Looking up he could see the river shining through the trees and rich green woods and blue hills beyond. He moved towards the river.
Presently he heard voices behind a hazel-tree and, peeping, he saw Haslam and Minna sitting hand in hand, he murmuring, she smiling. Then suddenly Haslam caught Minna to him and they kissed.
Bennett stole away, his heart fluttering. What he had seen sent a great emotion rushing through him, but soon it withered and became disgust. He felt a strange futile anger against the couple, an anger so absurd that it mocked him. He had idealised the whole of the Folyat family, and to see Minna like that degraded her. He did not see her in any ridiculous aspect. His conception of love was too boyishly lofty for that, and yet beneath his anger and his feeling of outrage was the sense of the ridiculous, which must accompany any intrusion into the private affairs of another.
Bennett had plenty of imagination, but he had not trained it to run in harness with his observation. His imagination had, so far, only coloured and inflamed the theories he had imbibed during his education concerning human nature, and, as these theories nowhere met the facts, he was perpetually being shocked by his observations. Having, as yet, no experience, his theories remained unassailed. He believed that he loved Gertrude Folyat with a pure and ennobling love, as a man should love a woman; as, in fact, a man may love the Venus de Milo, a creature of stone. A woman, according to Bennett's docile acceptance of trite theory, must be a goddess of beauty, purity, and chastity, with never a worldly desire or thought. The woman of his love, in fine, must be the Virgin Mother.
That Gertrude was ten years his senior made it all the easier for him to raise her to this exalted position in his idea. Having achieved this with her, without any reference to her wishes or desires, he had manufactured a halo for each of her sisters as her attendant saints. He had never kissed Gertrude except as a devout person kisses Saint Peter's toe. He had dreamed of kisses, and had, with unholy joy, conceived a horror of himself as a terrible and immoral young man, so that his vanity also was implicated in this catastrophe of Minna's downfall. What, at bottom, troubled him most of all was the obvious truth that Minna kissed Basil Haslam because she liked it.