When he won the Newdigate, she came running to me with the news, as pleased as Punch.

I gave him a dinner in honour of it, if you remember." "I remember," said I.
I did not remind him that he had made a speech which sent cold shivers down the spine of our young Apollo; that, in a fine rhetorical flourish--dear old fox-hunting ignoramus--he declared that the winner of the Newdigate carried the bays of the Laureate in his knapsack; that Randall, white-lipped with horror, murmured to Betty Fairfax, his neighbour at the table: "My God! The Poet-Laureate's unhallowed grave! I must burn the knapsack and take to a hod!" It was too tragical a conversation for light allusion.
"The poor dear child--Edith and I have sized it up--was all over him that evening." "What more youthfully natural," said I, "than that she should carry off the hero of the occasion--her childhood's playfellow ?" "All sorts of apparently insignificant details, Duncan, taken together--especially if they fit in--very often make up a whole case for prosecution." "You're a Chairman of Quarter Sessions," I admitted, "and so you ought to know." "I know this," said he, "that Holmes only spent part of that Christmas vacation with his mother, and went off somewhere or the other early in January." I cudgelled back my memory into confirmation of his statement.

To remember trivial incidents before the war takes a lot of cudgelling.Yes.I distinctly recollected the young man's telling me that Oxford being an intellectual hothouse and Wellingsford an intellectual Arabia Petrea, he was compelled, for the sake of his mental health, to find a period of repose in the intellectual Nature of London.

I mentioned this to Sir Anthony.
"Yet," I said, "I don't think he had anything to do with it." "Why ?" "It would have been far too much moral exertion--" "You call it moral ?" Sir Anthony burst out angrily.
I pacified him with an analysis, from my point of view, of Randall's character.

Centripetal forces were too strong for the young man.