and confounded masters and scholars in one dark
discouragement. "Warrender has only got a ---- in Mods." We decline to
place any number where that blank is; it filled every division (except
the lowest) with consternation and dismay. Warrender! who was as sure
of a first as--why, there was nobody who was so sure as Warrender! The
masters who were Cambridge men recovered their courage after a little,
and said, "I told you so! That was a boy who ought to have gone to
Cambridge, where individual characteristics are taken into consideration."
Warrender's tutor took to his bed, and was not visible for a week, after
which only the most unsympathetic, not to say brutal, of his colleagues
would have mentioned before him Warrender's name. However, time
reconciles all things, and after a while the catastrophe was forgotten
and everything was as before.

But not to Warrender himself. He smiled, poor boy, a Byronic smile,
with a curl of the upper lip such as suited the part, and saw himself
abandoned by the authorities with what he felt to be a lofty disdain;
and he relapsed into such studies as pleased him most, and set
prescribed books and lectures at defiance. What was worst to bear
was that other classes of "men" made up to him, after the men of
distinction, those whom the dons considered the best men, had withdrawn
and left him to pursue his own way. The men who loafed considered him
their natural prey; the aesthetic men who wrote bad verses opened their
arms, and were ready to welcome him as their own. And perhaps among
these classes he might have found disinterested friendship, for nobody
any longer sought Warrender on account of what he could do. But he
did not make the trial, wrapping himself up in a Childe-Harold-like
superiority to all those who would consort with him, now that he had
lost his hold of those with whom only he desired to consort. His mother
and sisters felt a little surprised, when they came up to Commemoration,
to find that they were not overwhelmed by invitations from Theo's friends.
Other ladies had not a spare moment: they were lost in a turmoil of
breakfasts, luncheons, water-parties, concerts, flower-shows, and knew
the interior of half the rooms in half the colleges. But with the Miss
Warrenders this was not so. They were asked to luncheon by Brunson,
indeed, and had tea in the rooms of a young Cavendish, who had been at
school with Theo. But that was all, and it mortified the girls, who were
not pre