And yet the man’s instincts, at this period of his life at any rate, were habitually kindly and affectionate. He knew nothing of women, and was not liked by them, but it was not his fault if he made no impression on the youth about him. It seemed to him that he was always seeking in their eyes and faces for some light of sympathy which was always escaping him, and which he was powerless to compel. He met it for the first time in Robert Elsmere. The susceptible, poetical boy was struck at some favorable moment by that romantic side of the ineffective tutor--his silence, his melancholy, his personal beauty--which no one else, with perhaps one or two exceptions among the older men, cared to take into account; or touched perhaps by some note in him, surprised in passing, by weariness or shrinking, as compared with the contemptuous tone of the college toward him. He showed his liking impetuously, boyishly, as his way was, and thenceforward during his University career Langham became his slave. He had no ambition for himself; his motto might have been that dismal one--‘The small things of life are odious to me, and the habit of them enslaves me; the great things of life are eternally attractive to me, and indolence and fear put them by;’ but for the University chances of this lanky, red-haired youth--with his eagerness, his boundless curiosity, his genius for all sorts of lovable mistakes--he disquieted himself greatly. He tried to discipline the roving mind, to infuse into the boy’s literary temper the delicacy, the precision, the subtlety of his own. His fastidious, critical habits of work supplied exactly the antidote which Elsmere’s main faults of haste and carelessness required. He was always holding up before him the inexhaustible patience and labor involved in all true knowledge; and it was to the germs of critical judgment so planted in him that Elsemere owed many of the later growths of his development--growths with which we have not yet to concern ourselves. And in return, the tutor allowed himself rarely, very rarely, a moment of utterance from the depths of his real self. One evening, in the summer term following the boy’s matriculation, Elsmere brought him an essay after Hall, and they sat on talking afterward. It was a rainy, cheerless evening; the first contest of the Boats week had been rowed in cold wind and sheet; a dreary blast whistled through the college. Suddenly Langham reached out his hand for an open letter. ‘I have had an offer, Elsmere,’ he said, abruptly. And he put it into his hand. It was the offer of an important Scotch professorship, coming from the man most influential in assigning it. The last occupant of the post had been a scholar of European eminence. Langham’s contributions to a great foreign review, and certain Oxford recommendations, were the basis of the present overture, which, coming from one who was himself a classic of the classics, was couched in terms flattering to any young man’s vanity.