It was the custom during the summer for the various guilds and clubs connected with the parish to be entertained in turn at the College. It had never happened that Mark had accompanied any of these outings, which in the early days of St. Agnes' had been regarded with dread by the College authorities, so many flowers were picked, so much fruit was stolen, but which now were as orderly and respectable excursions as you could wish to see. Mark's first visit to Silchester was on the occasion of Father Rowley's terminal sermon in the June after he was nineteen. He found the experience intimidating, because he was not yet old enough to have learnt self-confidence and he had never passed through the ordeal either of a first term at a public school or of a first term at the University. Boys are always critical, and at Silchester with the tradition of six hundred years to give them a corporate self-confidence, the judgment of outsiders is more severe than anywhere in the world, unless it might be in the New Hebrides. Added to their critical regard was a chilling politeness which would have made downright insolence appear cordial in comparison. Mark felt like Gulliver in the presence of the Houyhnms. These noble animals, so graceful, so clean, so condescending, appalled him. Yet he had found the Silchester men who came to visit the Mission easy enough to get on with. No doubt they, without their background were themselves a little shy, although their shyness never mastered them so far as to make them ill at ease. Here, however, they seemed as imperturbable and unbending as the stone saints, row upon row on the great West front of the Cathedral. Mark apprehended more clearly than ever the powerful personality of Father Rowley when he found that these noble young animals accorded to him the same quality of respect that they gave to a popular master or even to a popular athlete. The Missioner seemed able to understand their intimate and allusive conversation, so characteristic of a small and highly developed society; he seemed able to chaff them at the right moment; to take them seriously when they ought to be taken seriously; in a word to have grasped without being a Siltonian the secret of Silchester. He and Mark were staying at a house which possessed super-imposed upon the Silchester tradition a tradition of its own extending over the forty years during which the Reverend William Jex Monkton had been a house master. It was difficult for Mark, who had nothing but the traditions of Haverton House for a standard to understand how with perfect respect the boys could address their master by his second name without prejudice to discipline. Yet everybody in Jex's house called him Jex; and when you looked at that delightful old gentleman himself with his criss-cross white tie and curly white hair, you realized how impossible it was for him to be called anything else except Jex.