He took it very hardly. On the face of it, it seemed that her kiss had been no more than a piece of mad, cynical trifling; but his respect for himself—which was considerable, as became his years—would not allow him to believe this. He decided, instead, that Dorothy Powys’s kiss had been the symbol of a great and noble passion, fated, in the melancholy manner of nearly every legendary lore, to frustration. He was convinced that the unknown major in the Indian army would never be loved; that the memory of that intense moment on Mr. Willis’s back stairs would haunt his wife for ever, and temper with romance the vistas of an unhappy marriage. The main result of the incident in Edwin’s case was a spate of passionate but imitative verses, a new devotion to such music as repressed his particular portion of _weltschmerz_, and an anxiety to confide the story, with elaborations, to some sympathetic friend. He turned it on to W.G.
“Well, W.G., what do you think of it?” he asked, when he had finished.
W.G. sucked at his pipe and smiled good-humouredly.
“Better luck next time, old chap,” he said.
IN the following June the second professional examination was held. On a stifling morning, when the blue brick pavements of North Bromwich reflected a torrid heat, and a warm wind, blowing like a sirocco from the black desert outside, swept the streets with clouds of dust, Edwin, Maskew, and W.G. waited in the cloakroom outside the Dean’s office to see the results of the examination posted. Maskew was the only one of the three who showed no signs of nervousness; for W.G. could never overcome the difficulty of expressing his thoughts on paper, and Edwin had passed ten minutes of purgatory with an outside examiner in the anatomy _viva_. He knew, on the other hand, that his Physiology had been extraordinarily good, and put his faith in the general impression of intelligence that he hoped he had created.
The porter came out with the lists, and W.G., striding to meet his fate like some Homeric hero, snatched the paper from his hands. He went very white as he read it.
“Rotten luck if you’re down, W.G.,” said Maskew sympathetically.
He still looked bewildered. Edwin took the paper from his trembling hands. As he had expected Maskew was first, but he saw that he himself was second on the list. Martin had ambled through respectively somewhere about the middle. W.G. and Harrop were last and last but one. He pinned the list on the notice-board. It was an exhilarating moment in which he was conscious of the herculean, sweaty handgrip of W.G. who was muttering: “Well, I’m damned if we don’t all deserve it.”
