And he saw himself going up for his scholarship exam. He had painstakingly read Macaulay's essays in the train for style. He remembered putting his old Waterbury on the desk before him so that each question might have fifteen minutes. He remembered--oh, he remembered the look of the commons on his first breakfast table, a ploughed field the first time he walked to Coton, the stained glass in the Round Church East window seen from the Union writing-room, villas in the Cherry Hinton Road, a print on David's stall in the market-place, rain on Garret Hostel Bridge, Clare Avenue one very early morning. Then he saw, suddenly, grotesquely stretched bodies and legs, sprawled fervently by praying men in the Henry Martyn Hall. He heard one of them speak: "O God, make all slack men _keen_." Paul chuckled to himself, because he loved it so. Then he wished vividly and acutely that he had finally rewritten that line in the proof of his book. It was about brown withered ivy on the trunk of a pine in Hursley Woods. There was a little curl of brown hair too that slipped always under Edith's ear. He would give her the first copy himself, if he had to go to Claxted personally and especially to do it. He would give it her in Hursley Woods. No he wouldn't; he would give it her in Lambeth Court. He would take her for a walk. They would go past the "South Pole." They would walk up to the lamp-post, and he would hand her the book. "That's yours," he would say, "all of it. And I still want to preach in Lambeth Court though I did write it. Now what do you say?" Paul began to sing the Glory Song. Manning put his head in. "Great Scott, Paul," he said, "what's all the noise about?" Paul flushed guiltily. Then he laughed. "I can't help it, Manning," he said. "I feel too bucked for words. I know I'm quite mad, but I can't help it." And it was jolly threading the busy Christmas streets in a taxi, arriving at the hotel door, having a man in uniform open it for you so importantly, hearing the girl in the office tell the page to take the gentlemen to the Literary Lounge dining-room, and the finding of it full of men awaiting them. There was Donaldson, explosive but genial, warmed with excitement already. "Hullo, Kestern! Damned glad to see you again. I say, I congratulate you, you know, but didn't I always say you'd do it?" And Strether, looking big and ungainly in his black clothes that never fitted particularly, but smiling grimly. "Felicitations, Kestern, and all that sort of thing." ("By Gad, Gussie, felicitations! Keep that for your speech, old horse. What's that? Always making a row? Ha, ha, ha--that's damned good! Good old Gussie!")