sit quiet,
with the slight unconscious look of fatigue which was so eloquent of
a strenuous intellectual life, taking kindly heed of anything that
sincerity, even a stupid awkward sincerity, had got to say--these were
the sort of impressions they had left behind them, reinforced always,
indeed, by the one continuous impression of a great soul speaking with
difficulty and labor, but still clearly, still effectually, through an
unblemished series of noble acts and efforts.

Term after term passed away. Mrs. Elsmere became more and more proud
of her boy, and more and more assured that her years of intelligent
devotion to him had won her his entire love and confidence, 'so long as
they both should live;' she came up to him once or twice, making Lagham
almost flee the University because she would be grateful to him in
public, and attending the boat-races in festive attire to which she had
devoted the most anxious attention for Robert's sake, and which made
her, dear, good, impracticable soul, the observed of all observers. When
she came, she and Robert talked all day, so far as lectures allowed, and
most of the night, after their own eager, improvident fashion; and she
soon gathered with that solemn, half-tragic sense of change which besets
a mother's heart at such a moment, that there were many new forces at
work in her boy's mind, deep undercurrents of feeling, stirred in him
by the Oxford influences, which must before long rise powerfully to the
surface.

He was passing from a bright, buoyant lad into a man, and a man of ardor
and conviction. And the chief instrument in the transformation was Mr.
Grey.

Elsmere got his first in Moderations easily. But the Final schools were
a different matter. In the first days of his, return to Oxford, in the
October of his third year, while he was still making up his lecture
list, and taking a general oversight of the work demanded from him,
before plunging definitely into it, he was oppressed with a sense that
the two years lying before him constituted a problem which would be
harder to solve than any which had yet been set him. It seemed to him in
a moment which was one of some slackness and reaction, that he had been
growing too fast. He had been making friends besides in far too many
camps, and the thought, half attractive, half repellent, of all those
midnight discussions over smouldering fires, which Oxford was preparing
for him, those fascinating moments of intellectual fence