In this Lilly fully concurred. She, too, had little cause to be satisfied with the course of mundane events, and she gave eloquent and passionate expression to her sentiments.
"As for you," she concluded, "what tortures your spirit must undergo when it feels itself hampered in its flight by the humiliating demands of the schoolroom!"
He looked at her in some wonderment and remarked:
"I in your place," Lilly went on, "would not care a fig inside myself for all that vapid stuff. I would just do what is necessary in an offhand way, and then in complete spiritual freedom climb to the height where the great poets and philosophers dwell."
"Yes, but the examinations!" he exclaimed, utterly horrified.
"Oh, those stupid examinations!" she rejoined. "What difference does it make whether or not you pass?"
"You don't understand at all, not at all. Examinations are in a sense the avenue leading to every good position in life, no matter whether you enter the university or study architecture, or merely try for a good place in the postal service. But that, of course, I wouldn't do."
He smiled faintly, feeling stroked the right way.
"I don't want to storm the heavens exactly," he said, "but I have my ambitions. What would a fellow be if he had no ambitions?"
"That is so, isn't it?" Lilly cried, looking up to him with a grateful gleam in her eyes. The feeling that she had never experienced such an hour of joy took complete hold of her.
When he arose to go--it had grown quite dark--she felt actual physical pain, as if a piece of her body were being torn from her.
He had almost closed the door when he turned and said as one who wishes to be sure where he treads:
"If it's not troubling you too much, do hunt for the poems once more. Perhaps you will find them."
"You might lay the book under the door-mat if you find it."
Lilly hastily lighted the lamp and obediently started on the search. After a time the futility of doing so occurred to her.
He spent the summer vacation in the country with a companion in misery, with whom he crammed for the examinations. The written tests were to be given immediately after the opening of school, and the oral tests about the middle of September.
The young hero looked pale and exhausted, and reddish-brown stubble lay in the hollows of his cheeks like blotches of blood.