experiences were
those intervals at Kensington, scraps of his adolescence, as it were,
lying amidst the new matter of his manhood, intervals during which he
was simply an insubordinate and disappointing student with an
increasing disposition to gossip. At South Kensington he dwelt with
theories and ideals as a student should; at the little rooms in
Chelsea--they grew very stuffy as the summer came on, and the
accumulation of the penny novelettes Ethel favoured made a
litter--there was his particular private concrete situation, and
ideals gave place to the real.

It was a strangely narrow world, he perceived dimly, in which his
manhood opened. The only visitors were the Chafferys. Chaffery would
come to share their supper, and won upon Lewisham in spite of his
roguery by his incessantly entertaining monologue and by his expressed
respect for and envy of Lewisham's scientific attainments. Moreover,
as time went on Lewisham found himself more and more in sympathy with
Chaffery's bitterness against those who order the world. It was good
to hear him on bishops and that sort of people. He said what Lewisham
wanted to say beautifully. Mrs. Chaffery was perpetually
flitting--out of the house as Lewisham came home, a dim, black,
nervous, untidy little figure. She came because Ethel, in spite of her
expressed belief that love was "all in all," found married life a
little dull and lonely while Lewisham was away. And she went hastily
when he came, because of a certain irritability that the struggle
against the world was developing. He told no one at Kensington about
his marriage, at first because it was such a delicious secret, and
then for quite other reasons. So there was no overlapping. The two
worlds began and ended sharply at the wrought-iron gates. But the day
came when Lewisham passed those gates for the last time and his
adolescence ended altogether.

In the final examination of the biological course, the examination
that signalised the end of his income of a weekly guinea, he knew well
enough that he had done badly. The evening of the last day's practical
work found him belated, hot-headed, beaten, with ruffled hair and red
ears. He sat to the last moment doggedly struggling to keep cool and
to mount the ciliated funnel of an earthworm's nephridium. But
ciliated funnels come not to those who have shirked the laboratory
practice. He rose, surrendered his paper to the morose elderly young
assistant demonstrator who had we