Our good Monsignore was nominally at home during these weeks, but in a restless and excitable state. He would exhaust himself by feverish energy at golf for a day or two, then rush off in his motor, "for change," with valet and chauffeur, and return more tired than he had gone away. He attended one evening a big golfing-dinner at the Master of University's: dined well (according to his own account), drank hock, old port, and Benedictine, came home and rolled about all night in indescribable agony. Most of his duties he delegated to me, including, sometimes, the task of "interviewing" bewildered Catholic parents, to whom Oxford university life was an absolute _terra incognita_, and who {135} were puzzled or anxious about their sons' doings. Poor Lady E---- B----! I remember still the dismay with which she came to tell me how her boy had made friends in college with an Egyptian Moslem ("an unbaptized heathen Turk," was her description of him), and was bent on taking "digs" (lodgings) with him in the following term. I felt sympathy with the Catholic mother in her instinctive dislike to this prospect; but I felt none with the indignation of another parent (a distinguished diplomatist) at the refusal of one of the most sought-after colleges to admit his son. The fact was, as I had, after due inquiry, to explain tactfully to the aggrieved parent, that the youth (a pupil of one of our smaller Catholic schools) gave himself, at the preliminary interview with the college authorities, such "confounded airs" (as one of the dons expressed it) that they would have nothing to say to him. Probably the poor lad's "airs" were only one of the many forms in which extreme shyness manifests itself; anyhow it is fair to add that this was an exceptional case, and that our Catholic freshmen, as a whole, made a favourable impression by their good manners and modesty of demeanour. One Head, who had no sympathy at all with the Catholic religion, told me that so pleased was he with the Catholic contingent in his college, that he would willingly admit as many more as I cared to recommend to him.