Chapter 18 - Page 2

but that she did not see.
For the most part these letters were brief, for Lewisham, South
Kensington fashion, prided himself upon not being "literary," and some
of the more despatch-like wounded a heart perhaps too hungry for
tender words.

He did not meet Miss Heydinger's renewed advances with invariable
kindness. Yet something of the old relations were presently
restored. He would talk well to her for a time, and then snap like a
dry twig. But the loaning of books was resumed, the subtle process of
his aesthetic education that Miss Heydinger had devised. "Here is a
book I promised you," she said one day, and he tried to remember the
promise.

The book was a collection of Browning's Poems, and it contained
"Sludge"; it also happened that it contained "The Statue and the
Bust"--that stimulating lecture on half-hearted constraints. "Sludge"
did not interest Lewisham, it was not at all his idea of a medium, but
he read and re-read "The Statue and the Bust." It had the profoundest
effect upon him. He went to sleep--he used to read his literature in
bed because it was warmer there, and over literature nowadays it did
not matter as it did with science if one dozed a little--with these
lines stimulating his emotion:--

"So weeks grew months, years; gleam by gleam
The glory dropped from their youth and love,
And both perceived they had dreamed a dream."

By way of fruit it may be to such seed, he dreamed a dream that
night. It concerned Ethel, and at last they were a-marrying. He drew
her to his arms. He bent to kiss her. And suddenly he saw her lips
were shrivelled and her eyes were dull, saw the wrinkles seaming her
face! She was old! She was intolerably old! He woke in a kind of
horror and lay awake and very dismal until dawn, thinking of their
separation and of her solitary walk through the muddy streets,
thinking of his position, the leeway he had lost and the chances there
were against him in the battle of the world. He perceived the
colourless truth; the Career was improbable, and that Ethel should be
added to it was almost hopeless. Clearly the question was between
these two. Or should he vacillate and lose both? And then his
wretchedness gave place to that anger that comes of perpetually
thwarted desires....

It was on the day after this dream that he insulted Parkson so
grossly. He insulted Parkson after a meeting of the "Friends of
Progress" at Parkson's rooms.

No type of English student quite realises the noble ideal of plain
living and high thinking nowadays. Our admirable examination system
admits of extremely little thinking at any level, high or low. But the
Kensington