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III
For a time my friend stared silently into the red heart of the
fire. Then he said: "I never saw it again until I was seventeen.
"It leapt upon me for the third time--as I was driving to
Paddington on my way to Oxford and a scholarship. I had just one
momentary glimpse. I was leaning over the apron of my hansom
smoking a cigarette, and no doubt thinking myself no end of a man
of the world, and suddenly there was the door, the wall, the dear
sense of unforgettable and still attainable things.
"
We clattered by--I too taken by surprise to stop my cab until
we were well past and round a corner. Then I had a queer moment,
a double and divergent movement of my will: I tapped the little
door in the roof of the cab, and brought my arm down to pull out my
watch. 'Yes, sir!' said the cabman, smartly. 'Er--well--it's
nothing,' I cried. 'My mistake! We haven't much time! Go
on!' and he went on . . .
"I got my scholarship. And the night after I was told of that
I sat over my fire in my little upper room, my study, in my
father's house, with his praise--his rare praise--and his sound
counsels ringing in my ears, and I smoked my favourite pipe--the
formidable bulldog of adolescence--and thought of that door in the
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