Chapter 17

IN THE RAPHAEL GALLERY.

It was nearly three o'clock, and in the Biological Laboratory the
lamps were all alight. The class was busy with razors cutting sections
of the root of a fern to examine it microscopically. A certain silent
frog-like boy, a private student who plays no further part in this
story, was working intently, looking more like a frog than usual--his
expression modest with a touch of effort. Behind Miss Heydinger, jaded
and untidy in her early manner again, was a vacant seat, an abandoned
microscope and scattered pencils and note-books.

On the door of the class-room was a list of those who had passed the
Christmas examination. At the head of it was the name of the aforesaid
frog-like boy; next to him came Smithers and one of the girls
bracketed together. Lewisham ingloriously headed the second class, and
Miss Heydinger's name did not appear--there was, the list asserted,
"one failure." So the student pays for the finer emotions.

And in the spacious solitude of the museum gallery devoted to the
Raphael cartoons sat Lewisham, plunged in gloomy meditation. A
negligent hand pulled thoughtfully at the indisputable moustache, with
particular attention to such portions as were long enough to gnaw.

He was trying to see the situation clearly. As he was just smarting
acutely under his defeat, this speaks little for the clearness of his
mind. The shadow of that defeat lay across everything, blotted out the
light of his pride, shaded his honour, threw everything into a new
perspective. The rich prettiness of his love-making had fled to some
remote quarter of his being. Against the frog-like youngster he felt a
savage animosity. And Smithers had betrayed him. He was angry,
bitterly angry, with "swats" and "muggers" who spent their whole time
grinding for these foolish chancy examinations. Nor had the practical
examination been altogether fair, and one of the questions in the
written portion was quite outside the lectures. Biver, Professor
Biver, was an indiscriminating ass, he felt assured, and so too was
Weeks, the demonstrator. But these obstacles could not blind his
intelligence to the manifest cause of his overthrow, the waste of more
than half his available evening, the best time for study in the
twenty-four hours, day after day. And that was going on steadily, a
perpetual leakage of time. To-night he would go to meet her again, and
begin to accumulate to himself ignominy in the second part of the
course, the botanical section, also. And so, reluctantly rejecting one
cloudy excuse after another, he clearly focussed the antagonism
between his relations to Ethel and his immediate ambitions.

Things had come so easily to him for the last two years that