Further, in addition to her culpable demure innocency, Marguerite was wearing black.  Of course she was.  She had no choice.  Still, he hated her mourning.  Moreover, she was too modest; she did not impose herself.  Some girls wore mourning with splendid defiance.  Marguerite seemed to apologize; seemed to turn the other cheek to death....  He arrived critical, and naturally he found matter to criticize.

Her greeting showed quite candidly the pleasure she had in the sight of him.  Her heart was in the hand she gave him; he felt its mystic throbbings there.

“How are things?” he began.  “I rather thought I should have been hearing from you.”  He softened his voice to match the tenderness of her smile, but he did it consciously.

She replied: 

“I thought you’d have enough to worry about with the exam. without me.”

It was not a wise speech, because it implied that he was capable of being worried, of being disturbed in the effort of absorption necessary for the examination.  He laughed a little harshly.

“Well, you see the result!”

He had written to tell her of the disastrous incident and that failure was a certainty; a sort of shame had made him recoil from telling her to her face; it was easier to be casual in writing than in talking; the letter had at any rate tempered for both of them the shock of communication.  Now, he was out of humour with her because he had played the ass with an ass of an examiner—­not because she was directly or indirectly responsible for his doing so; simply because he had done so.  She was the woman.  It was true that she in part was indirectly responsible for the calamity, but he did not believe it, and anyhow would never have admitted it.

“Oh!  George!  What a shame it was!” As usual, not a trace of reproach from her:  an absolute conviction that he was entirely blameless.  “What shall you do?  You’ll have to sit again.”

“Sit again?  Me?” he exclaimed haughtily.  “I never shall!  I’ve done with exams.”  He meant it.

“But—­shall you give up architecture, then?”

“Certainly not!  My dear girl, what are you thinking of?  Of course I shan’t give up architecture.  But you needn’t pass any exams, to be an architect.  Anybody can call himself an architect, and be an architect, without passing exams.  Exams. are optional.  That’s what makes old Enwright so cross with our beautiful profession.”

He laughed again harshly.  All the time, beneath his quite genuine defiance, he was thinking what an idiot he had been to cheek the examiner, and how staggeringly simple it was to ruin years of industry by one impulsive moment’s folly, and how iniquitous was a world in which such injustice could be.

Marguerite was puzzled.  In her ignorance she had imagined that professions were inseparably connected with examinations.  However, she had to find faith to accept his dictum, and she found it.