From his marriage until the final examination in June, Lewisham’s life had an odd amphibious quality.  At home were Ethel and the perpetual aching pursuit of employment, the pelting irritations of Madam Gadow’s persistent overcharges, and so forth, and amid such things he felt extraordinarily grown up; but intercalated with these 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 welcomed him so flatteringly eight months before, and walked down the laboratory to the door where the rest of his fellow-students clustered.

Smithers was talking loudly about the “twistiness” of the identification, and the youngster with the big ears was listening attentively.