During the interval which has passed without record in these pages, Dick, the much suffering and much labouring, had encountered a great event, and had got through it, I do not say triumphantly, but at least successfully. The examination--the great exam., which had exercised his mind and temper for years--had come and passed; and Dick had pulled through. There he was, still walking about with books in his pocket, still in the trammels of “a coach,” and still subject to other terrible and ghastly episodes of exam., which had (I think) to be repeated for two or three years before the full-blown competition wallah was sent to India. I do not remember to have encountered in society many young men of this tremendously educated class, and therefore I cannot tell if Dick may be considered as a fair specimen; but this I can say, that considering the amount of information which must have been crammed into his head, it was astonishing how lightly he wore it. He was profoundly careful not to shock and humiliate the uninstructed mass of his fellow-creatures by letting it appear when there was no occasion for such vanities; and, in short, Dick examined and passed, was as much like Dick unexamined and dubious as could be supposed. Jenny had undergone a greater change. He had left Eton and had matriculated at Balliol, and felt himself a greater man than it is given to mortal in any other stage of existence to feel himself. He had done even more than this; he had gained a scholarship, and was thus actually paying part of his own expenses, a fact which his mother could not sufficiently admire and wonder at, and which still had all the freshness of a family joke in the house. It was astonishing how the brows of the two women cleared, how the atmosphere lightened when these two boys (oh, boys, I beg your pardon--men) came in. No complication had yet arisen in their young lives. Jenny had hung his mother’s photograph over the mantelpiece in his college sitting-room, and boasted that she had as much sense as all the dons put together, though she knew no Greek. I wonder whether in the progress of the human intellect this kind of boy will long survive; but the very sight of Jenny’s face (though he was not handsome), and Dick’s big figure, with a book in its coat pocket, was good for sore hearts as well as eyes.