ights of anxiety spent with the text-books for to-morrow's
exams: and there were unforgettable crowds of candidates sitting upon
the steps before each paper and going over their notes for a last time
with feverish futility. He remembered hating the people from Wren's as
he had hated the Grammar School boys in his scholarship exams,
jealously loathing and dreading their preparedness and notes and iron
methods. He remembered the filthy temper he was in and his contempt
for the scrubby little man who sat next to him and muttered to himself
incessantly. Martin had crammed Blankney's notes on the Attic
constitution because he had heard a rumour that Blankney was examining,
and he remembered a ceaseless effort to display knowledge which he did
not possess and to scrape up marks, marks, marks....

But the exams brought him also to Freda.

He found her pale and tired and more fragile than ever: he found her
working from ten to six and idling despondently in the evenings. Quite
obviously she was not the woman he had known in Devonshire.

Then she was strong and at her ease, full of mysterious confidence,
rejoicing in life and her ability to cope with it. He had been to her
merely an undergraduate, nicely foolish, he had amused her and she had
read his letters, even answered them. He had chattered of affection
and she had laughed him gently to scorn.

Now he came to her as a man in a world where men were scarce and men
were needed. But it was Freda who had changed, not Martin. The
transformation of the boy into the man was due to the heat of summer
and the click of typewriters. To one deafened with the city's roar
Martin brought memories of perfect woods and lonely pines that stood
out against emptiness, starkly black. They used to go out together in
the evenings, to Richmond, to Putney Heath, to Hampstead. They went
where the others went because they were as the others, hard-worked,
tired-out, desperately needing one another. There was no glory of
passion in their evenings. Street lamps did not flame as flowers of
the East, trees did not tower like giants luring them with soft voices,
water was still water. Earth and sky had not altered for them: it had
not altered for the others who wandered in the same places.

One Monday at half-past five Martin hurried out of Burlington House
after his second paper in English Literature. Never in his life had he
written more in six hours: he had drained his soul of platitu