From an Oxford of glaring streets and searching, irresistible dust Martin went up to London to seek his fortune at Burlington House. Later he remembered that August as a month of blazing heat and tired hands and aching head. He remembered a gloomy place shaped like a theatre where morose men asked him if he had a buff book and tore his papers from under his pen when time was up. There were days of solid labour and nights of anxiety spent with the text-books for to-morrow's exams: and there were unforgettable crowds of candidates sitting upon the steps before each paper and going over their notes for a last time with feverish futility. He remembered hating the people from Wren's as he had hated the Grammar School boys in his scholarship exams, jealously loathing and dreading their preparedness and notes and iron methods. He remembered the filthy temper he was in and his contempt for the scrubby little man who sat next to him and muttered to himself incessantly. Martin had crammed Blankney's notes on the Attic constitution because he had heard a rumour that Blankney was examining, and he remembered a ceaseless effort to display knowledge which he did not possess and to scrape up marks, marks, marks.... But the exams brought him also to Freda. He found her pale and tired and more fragile than ever: he found her working from ten to six and idling despondently in the evenings. Quite obviously she was not the woman he had known in Devonshire. Then she was strong and at her ease, full of mysterious confidence, rejoicing in life and her ability to cope with it. He had been to her merely an undergraduate, nicely foolish, he had amused her and she had read his letters, even answered them. He had chattered of affection and she had laughed him gently to scorn. Now he came to her as a man in a world where men were scarce and men were needed. But it was Freda who had changed, not Martin. The transformation of the boy into the man was due to the heat of summer and the click of typewriters. To one deafened with the city's roar Martin brought memories of perfect woods and lonely pines that stood out against emptiness, starkly black. They used to go out together in the evenings, to Richmond, to Putney Heath, to Hampstead. They went where the others went because they were as the others, hard-worked, tired-out, desperately needing one another. There was no glory of passion in their evenings. Street lamps did not flame as flowers of the East, trees did not tower like giants luring them with soft voices, water was still water. Earth and sky had not altered for them: it had not altered for the others who wandered in the same places.