by women’s attitudes.  And if Hill never by any chance mentioned the topic of love to her, she only credited him with the finer modesty for that omission.  So the time came on for the second examination, and Hill’s increasing pallor confirmed the general rumour that he was working hard.  In the aerated bread shop near South Kensington Station you would see him, breaking his bun and sipping his milk, with his eyes intent upon a paper of closely written notes.  In his bedroom there were propositions about buds and stems round his looking-glass, a diagram to catch his eye, if soap should chance to spare it, above his washing basin.  He missed several meetings of the debating society, but he found the chance encounters with Miss Haysman in the spacious ways of the adjacent art museum, or in the little museum at the top of the College, or in the College corridors, more frequent and very restful.  In particular, they used to meet in a little gallery full of wrought-iron chests and gates, near the art library, and there Hill used to talk, under the gentle stimulus of her flattering attention, of Browning and his personal ambitions.  A characteristic she found remarkable in him was his freedom from avarice.  He contemplated quite calmly the prospect of living all his life on an income below a hundred pounds a year.  But he was determined to be famous, to make, recognisably in his own proper person, the world a better place to live in.  He took Bradlaugh and John Burns for his leaders and models, poor, even impecunious, great men.  But Miss Haysman thought that such lives were deficient on the aesthetic side, by which, though she did not know it, she meant good wall-paper and upholstery, pretty books, tasteful clothes, concerts, and meals nicely cooked and respectfully served.

At last came the day of the second examination, and the professor of botany, a fussy, conscientious man, rearranged all the tables in a long narrow laboratory to prevent copying, and put his demonstrator on a chair on a table (where he felt, he said, like a Hindoo god), to see all the cheating, and stuck a notice outside the door, “Door closed,” for no earthly reason that any human being could discover.  And all the morning from ten till one the quill of Wedderburn shrieked defiance at Hill’s, and the quills of the others chased their leaders in a tireless pack, and so also it was in the afternoon.  Wedderburn was a little quieter than usual, and Hill’s face was hot all day, and his overcoat bulged with textbooks and notebooks against the last moment’s revision.  And the next day, in the morning and in the afternoon, was the practical examination, when sections had to be cut and slides identified.  In the morning Hill was depressed because he knew he had cut a thick section, and in the afternoon came the mysterious slip.