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 he had taken his steady upward progress in life as assured.  It had never occurred to him, when he went to intercept Ethel after that seance, that he went into any peril of that sort.  Now he had had a sharp reminder.  He began to shape a picture of the frog-like boy at home—­he was a private student of the upper middle class—­sitting in a convenient study with a writing-table, book-shelves, and a shaded lamp—­Lewisham worked at his chest of drawers, with his greatcoat on, and his feet in the lowest drawer wrapped in all his available linen—­and in the midst of incredible conveniences the frog-like boy was working, working, working.  Meanwhile Lewisham toiled through the foggy streets, Chelsea-ward, or, after he had left her, tramped homeward—­full of foolish imaginings.

He began to think with bloodless lucidity of his entire relationship to Ethel.  His softer emotions were in abeyance, but he told himself no lies.  He cared for her, he loved to be with her and to talk to her and please her, but that was not all his desire.  He thought of the bitter words of an orator at Hammersmith, who had complained that in our present civilisation even the elemental need of marriage was denied.  Virtue had become a vice.  “We marry in fear and trembling, sex for a home is the woman’s traffic, and the man comes to his heart’s desire when his heart’s desire is dead.”  The thing which had seemed a mere flourish, came back now with a terrible air of truth.  Lewisham saw that it was a case of divergent ways.  On the one hand that shining staircase to fame and power, that had been his dream from the very dawn of his adolescence, and on the other hand—­Ethel.

And if he chose Ethel, even then, would he have his choice?  What would come of it?  A few walks more or less!  She was hopelessly poor, he was hopelessly poor, and this cheat of a Medium was her stepfather!  After all she was not well-educated, she did not understand his work and his aims....

He suddenly perceived with absolute conviction that after the seance he should have gone home and forgotten her.  Why had he felt that irresistible impulse to seek her out?  Why had his imagination spun such a strange web of possibilities about her?  He was involved now, foolishly involved....  All his future was a sacrifice to this transitory ghost of love-making in the streets.  He pulled spitefully at his moustache.