“Isn’t it extraordinary,” she said, hoping to hide the fact that she had missed his last remark, “the way these people leave the lights switched on all the time, everywhere.” “Cheap electricity,” he said as if in parenthesis, and as if apologetically reminding her of what she already knew—“Water power. They pay a rate and use as much as they like.” In all his answers there was this manner of apologising for giving information. And his talk, even the perfect little story of the local barber and the newspapers, which he told at top pace as if grudging the moment it wasted, was like a shorthand annotation to essential unspoken things, shared interests and opinions taken for granted. Talking with him she no longer felt as she had done last night either that she was at a private view of an exclusive exhibition, or gathering fresh light on social problems. There was in him something unbounded, that enhanced the light reflected into the room from the sunlit snow. His affectionate allusion to his Cambridge brought to her mind complete in all its parts—together with gratitude for the peace he gave in which things could expand unhindered—her own so sparse possession: her week-ends there with the cousins, their blinkered, comfort-loving academic friends, the strange sense of at once creeping back into security and realising how far she had come away from it; their kindnesses, their secret hope of settling her for life in their enclosed world, and their vain efforts to mould her to its ways; and then the end, the growing engrossments in London breaking the link that held her to them and to the past they embodied—and Cambridge left lit by their sweet hospitality, by the light streaming on Sunday afternoons through King’s Chapel windows; the Backs in sunlight, and a memory of the halting little chime. When she told him of the things that Cambridge had left with her, she paused just in time to escape adding to them the gait of the undergraduates: the slovenly stride whose each footfall sent the chin forward with a hen-like jerk. He agreed at once with her choice, but hesitated over the little chime. “It might have been a new church. I never saw it. But if you had once heard it you _couldn’t_ forget it.” It was absurd to be holding to her solitary chime in face of his four years’ residence. But it seemed now desperately important to state exactly the quality she had felt and never put into words. She sat listening—aware of him waiting in a sympathetic stillness—to each note as it sounded out into the sky above the town, making it no longer Cambridge but a dream-city, subduing the graceless modern bricks and mortar to harmony with the ancient beauty of the colleges—until the whole was a loveliness beneath the evening sky—and presently found herself speaking with reckless enthusiasm.