- "I remember the dreamy flow of punts and canoes on the Cam," Nabokov writes. (The punts are boats, propelled by the long sticks pushed off the bottom of the channel.) (13.5.1)
- Nabokov remembers this romantically, girls reclining on the boats beneath umbrellas.
- Almost seventeen years after graduation, Nabokov makes the mistake of coming back to Cambridge while looking for a teaching job.
- On the visit, he has lunch with his old debating partner Nesbit, who in aging has come to loom more like the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, so Nabokov changes his name thereafter.
- Ibsen is unable concentrate, renounces Stalinist, declares that he misses Lenin, then leaves.
- Nabokov strolls around Cambridge, unable to feel properly sentimental.
- In a last attempt, he goes to visit is former college tutor, E. Forrester, who does not recognize him until Nabokov manages to once again knock over the tea, as he did during their first meeting twenty years before.
- "Oh, yes, of course," he said, "I know who you are." (13.5.4)