s like those! [212] increase
however his sense of responsibility to the place, of which he is now
more exclusively than before a part--that he belongs to it, its great
memories, great dim purposes; deepen the consciousness he had on first
coming hither of a demand in the world about him, whereof the very
stones are emphatic, to which no average human creature could be
sufficient; of reproof, reproaches, of this or that in himself.

It was reported, there was a funny belief, at school, that Aldy Uthwart
had no feeling and was incapable of tears. They never came to him
certainly, when, at nights for the most part, the very touch of home,
so soft, yet so indifferent to him, reached him, with a sudden opulent
rush of garden perfumes; came at the rattling of the window-pane in the
wind, with anything that expressed distance from the bare white walls
around him here. He thrust it from him brusquely, being of a practical
turn, and, though somewhat sensuous, wholly without sentimentality.
There is something however in the lad's soldier-like, impassible
self-command, in his sustained expression of a certain indifference to
things, which awakes suddenly all the sentiment, the poetry, latent
hitherto in another--James Stokes, the prefect, his immediate superior;
awakes for the first time into ample flower something of genius in a
seemingly plodding scholar, and therewith also something of the
waywardness popularly thought to belong to [213] genius. Preceptores,
condiscipuli, alike, marvel at a sort of delicacy coming into the
habits, the person, of that tall, bashful, broad-shouldered, very
Kentish, lad; so unaffectedly nevertheless, that it is understood after
all to be but the smartness properly significant of change to early
manhood, like the down on his lip. Wistful anticipations of manhood
are in fact aroused in him, thoughts of the future; his ambition takes
effective outline. The well-worn, perhaps conventional, beauties of
their "dead" Greek and Latin books, associated directly now with the
living companion beside him, really shine for him at last with their
pristine freshness; seem more than to fulfil their claim upon the
patience, the attention, of modern youth. He notices as never before
minute points of meaning in Homer, in Virgil; points out thus, for
instance, to his junior, one day in the sunshine, how the Greeks had a
special word for the Fate which accompanied one who would come to a
violent end. The common