The determination to abandon mathematics for a line of study more germane to that career of which he already had some vision met with no resistance from his people; but it did not altogether please the college authorities. He wrote to old Mr. Dilke: "When I told Hopkins" (his tutor) "that I was not going out in mathematics, he was taken aback, and seemed very sorry. He urged me to _read law_, but still to go out as a high senior optime, which he says I could be, without reading more than a very small quantity of mathematics every day. My objection to this was that I knew myself better than he did; that were I to go in for mathematics, I should be as high in that tripos as my talents would let me, and that my law and my life's purpose would suffer in consequence. "He said--'You will be very sorry if it happens that you are not first legalist of your year--that is the only place in the Law Tripos that you can be content with--and yet remember you have Shee in your year, who is always a dangerous adversary, and who starts with some little knowledge on the subject.' "I said I should read with Shee, and make him understand that I was intended by Nature to beat him." The dangerous Shee had been thus announced in a letter of February, 1863: "Shee--son of the well-known Serjeant, [Footnote: Mr. Serjeant Shee was later a Judge--the first Roman Catholic since the time of the Stuarts to sit on the English Bench.] has come up and taken the rooms over me. He seems a nice kind of fellow; of course, a strong Romanist." Shee remained till the end Dilke's chief competitor, and he was also one of the band of friends who met each other incessantly, and incessantly talked over first principles till the small hours of morning. Perhaps it is not without importance that Charles Dilke should have had the experience, not very common for Englishmen, of living on terms of intimacy with an Irish Roman Catholic: at all events, his relations in after-life, both with Irishmen and with Roman Catholics, were more friendly than is common. For the moment Shee made one factor in the discussions upon theology which are inevitable among undergraduates, and which went on with vigour in this little group, according to the recollection of Judge Steavenson, who in those days, faithful to the orthodoxy of his Low Church upbringing, found himself ranged by the side of the 'strong Romanist' against a general onslaught upon Christianity. Charley Dilke himself had come under the influences of the place and the time. There is an entry headed May, 1863: "I find a fair argument against miracles in my notes for this month." He had abandoned attendance at Communion, but, according to Judge Steavenson, did not go further in opinions or in talk than a vague agnosticism--which was also the attitude of another subtle and agile intelligence in that circle.