Escaping from the stifling moral atmosphere of his mother’s boudoir, Gerald found his first ideas of a higher and a nobler life at South Hill. At the Abbey he had been taught to believe that there were two good things in the world, rank and money; but that even rank, the very flower of life, must droop and fade if not manured with gold. At South Hill he learned to think lightly of both, and to aspire to something better than either. For the sake of being praised and admired by Madoline he worked, almost honestly, at Eton and Oxford. She kindled his ambition, and, inspired by her, his youth and talent blossomed into poetry. He sat up late at nights writing impassioned verse. He dashed off wild stanzas in the ‘To Thyrza’ style, when his brain was fired by the mild orgies of a modern wine, and the fiercer rapture of a modern bear-fight. And Madoline was his only Thyrza. He was not a man who can find his Egeria in every street. For a little while he fancied that it was in him to be a second Byron; that the divine breath inflated his lungs; that he had but to strike on the cithara for the divine accords to come. He strummed cleverly enough upon the sacred strings, spoiled a good deal of clean paper, and amused himself considerably. Then, failing—in consequence of an utter absence of the critical faculty—to win the prize for English verse, he turned his back upon the Muses, and henceforward spoke with ridicule of his poetic adolescence. Still the Muse had exercised her elevating influence; and, inspired by her and by Madoline, Gerald Goring had learned to despise those lesser aims which his mother had held before him as the sublimities of life.