Wenny laughed. They went into the candy store that was thick with the smell of fresh cooked chocolate. A boy with tow hair and a pimply face was washing glasses. Fanshaw found himself staring with a faint internal shudder at the red knuckles as his fingers moved round swiftly in glass under glass under the faucet. They drank glasses of orangeade in silence, Wenny paid the girl behind the cash-register who showed two gold teeth in a smile as they went out. Fanshaw was already thinking with eager anticipation of his room with its orange shaded lamp; the cosy bookish smell of it, the backs of his books in their case of well dusted mahogany and the discreet sheen of the gold letters of their titles in the lamplight, the sepia of the Primavera over the mantel, the neatness of his bedroom, the linen sheets on his bed, the clean aloofness of fresh pyjamas. "I often wonder why I go out in the evenings at all." "Why not?" "Things seem to me so ugly now, all this rasping and grinding. It used not to be so when I was in college but now it makes me feel so unpleasantly futile. When I'm in my room with everything about me as I have grouped it I feel futile too, but pleasantly futile, artistically futile." "Fanshaw, that's all utter rot." "That's no argument, Wenny, to call a thing rot." "But it's rot just the same." They walked along silent again. How hopeless to make oneself understood. Through the sting of bitterness Fanshaw remembered the first time he had seen Wenny. He had sat beside him in a classroom in front of the yellow varnished desk of the instructor. There was the dry smell of chalk and outside lilacs swayed against a blue sky full of little rosy clouds; the hideous lassitude of words in an even voice that smelt of chalk and blackboards, and besides him a thin brownfaced boy with moist brown eyes intent on everything, the chalky words of the instructor, the lilacs outside, the swallows that flashed against the sky. And now they walked back side by side towards Cambridge as they had walked hundreds of other nights at about this hour, and his arm touched Wenny's arm occasionally as it swung. Was it four years, five years, they had known each other? Hopeless all these futile walks, this constant juggling of words. Wenny's stride was even with his stride now, occasionally the backs of their hands touched as they swung. For all they could tell each other they might be on different continents. Fanshaw felt frozen and rigid in ferocious loneliness. And now there was Nan. The thought that he might love her, that he might be losing himself to her disturbed him so that he tried to brush it aside. "Strange how we are all settling down," he said. All the while he was thinking of love, his boyish idea of love elegant over teacups, suppertables on terraces at Capri, a handing of old fashioned bouquets with a rose in the center, red rose of passion, romaunt of the rose. "I haven't settled down," said Wenny, savagely. "I wish I had."