That day passed smoothly; and the next. The days sinking to evenings drenched with the smell of honeysuckle and draining to phantasmal and translucent twilights of blossom and tree-tops and starry skies, flowed imperceptibly to their end. Suddenly there were no answers to be written from nine till twelve, from two till five--no lectures, no coachings, no notes, no fixed working hours. Instead, a great idleness under whose burden you felt lost and oppressed. The academic years were gone for ever. 13 The evening before the end of term. Judith walked with the rest of the circle arm in arm across the grass, down the wooded path, past the honeysuckle for the last time. The garden spread out all her beauties that were hers alone, overburdening the watchers, insisting: ‘See what you are leaving. Look at what you will never have again.’ The whole shrine lay wide open for the last time, baring its mysteries of cedar and limes and nightingales, of lawns and mown hay, of blossoming shrubs and wild flowers growing beneath them, of copper beeches and all the high enclosing tree-tops, serenely swimming like clouds in the last of the light. They chose careers for each other, light-heartedly discussing the future, and making plans for regular reunions. ‘But what’s the good?’ said one. ‘We shall all be scattered really. We can’t come back year after year as if things would all be the same. There’s nothing more awful than those gatherings of elderly people trying to be girls together again. The ghastliness of pretending to get back to where one was! If we meet again, let it be in the big world. I shall never come back here.’ ‘Oh, but I shan’t have the strength to resist it,’ said another. ‘You see I more or less know I shall never be so happy again. I’ve got to teach brats algebra. I shall be _pulled_ back to indulge in vain regrets.’ ‘Does it mean so much to you?’ murmured Judith. ‘You talk as if your life was over.’ ‘Something that matters--terribly to me is over,’ she said, almost fiercely. ‘Oh!’ Judith sighed. ‘Doesn’t it mean anything to you then?’ Judith was silent, thinking how it had all meant the single tremendous calamitous significance of Jennifer; how since her going it had been like the muddy bed of a lake whose waters have been sapped day after day in a long drought; like a tasteless meal to be swallowed without appetite; like a grey drizzling unwholesome weather. Nothing had brought even a momentary illusion of restored contentment: nothing save her copper bowl glowing for her sake with flowers or fruit. Not one of those to whom she had turned had been able to sooth the gnawing perpetual sore, or bury for a single day that one face. And they knew it. The three years’ absorption in Jennifer had separated her irrevocably from them, and, though they had kindly welcomed her, it had been with the tacit assumption that she was not of them.