‘I understand French very little, and I never read any,’ she said to him once, quietly, as he fell to comparing some peasant story she had told him with an episode in one of George Sand’s Berry novels. It seemed to him that she knew her Wordsworth by heart. And her own mountain life, her own rich and meditative soul, had taught her judgments and comments on her favorite poet which stirred Elsmere every now and then to enthusiasm--so true they were and pregnant, so full often of a natural magic of expression. On the other hand, when he quoted a very well-known line of Shelley’s she asked him where it came from. She seemed to him deeper and simpler at every moment; her very limitations of sympathy and knowledge, and they were evidently many, began to attract him. The thought of her ancestry crossed him now and then, rousing in him now wonder, and now a strange sense of congruity and harmony. Clearly she was the daughter of a primitive unexhausted race. And yet what purity, what refinement, what delicate perception and self-restraint! Presently they fell on the subject of Oxford. ‘Were you ever there?’ he asked her. ‘Once,’ she said. ‘I went with my father one summer term. I have only, a confused memory of it--of the quadrangles, and a long street, a great building with a dome, and such beautiful trees!’ ‘Did your father often go back?’ ‘No; never toward the later part of his life’--and her clear eyes clouded a little, ‘nothing made him so sad as the thought of Oxford.’ She paused, as though she had strayed on to a topic where expression was a little difficult. Then his big face and clerical dress seemed somehow to reassure her, and she began again, though reluctantly. ‘He used to say that it was all so changed. The young fellows he saw when he went back scorned everything he cared for. Every visit to Oxford was like a stab to him. It seemed to him as if the place was full of men ‘Who only wanted to destroy and break down everything that was sacred to him.’ Elsmere reflected that Richard Leyburn must have left Oxford about the beginning of the Liberal reaction, which followed Tractarianism, and in twenty years transformed the University. ‘Ah!’ he said, smiling gently. ‘He should have lived a little longer. There is another turn of the tide since then. The destructive wave has spent itself, and at Oxford now many of us feel ourselves on the upward swell of a religious revival.’ Catherine looked up at him with a sweet sympathetic look. That dim vision of Oxford, with its gray, tree-lined walls, lay very near to her heart for her father’s sake. And the keen face above her seemed to satisfy and respond to her inner feeling. ‘I know the High Church influence is very strong,’ she said, hesitating; ‘but I don’t know whether father would have liked that much better.’