He grimly forbore from asking questions, and fell away from his frank boyish friendship with his own people--the cheery, intimate, and open good-fellowship with his father and his mother gave way to a strange aloofness, and there developed in its place a self-reliance and a haughty desire to try the wings of his own judgment that bred much foolishness, as well as strength. His mother sadly put down the lad’s cubbishness to the coming of manhood, and accepted much of the brusqueness as being a part of the inevitable period of cubhood when the whelp is for trying its strength and for leaving the litter. The lad’s arrival at Oxford started the man’s shadow in him to life. He moved towards the shadow eagerly, and grasped at the reality which cast it. Flung suddenly into a sea of youth of his own age, he was at grips with his own strength at once--tried it, as by instinct, against the wills of the youths about him, all of whom, also come abroad out of their homes, were essaying their strength and affections and cunning upon each other, straining the cords wilfully to the breaking pitch both of the affections and of the hostilities. It was the best thing that could have happened to the young blood; the strain of the life kept him from the fret of the injustice that had been put upon him, and drew his mind for awhile from brooding on the blackness of the empty place where his natural mate had until now moved in dainty harmony with his existence. He was in a new world. He suddenly found, to his surprise, that there was that which gave him position amongst the undergraduates which had been completely ignored amongst the intellectual Bohemians. These others had taken him on his merits--he was now taken on the merit of his family. He found that the important thing was not as to what he was, but as to what his father was. He was given his place and his measure of pleasantnesses largely in the degree of his social position. He awoke to the fact that he had a social position--a rung on a long ladder, reaching up to dignity and the smiles of the dignified others. The atmosphere here was wholly different. It was less literary, more academic; less intellectual, more scholastic; less original, more conventional; less artistic, more grammatic--life, literature, art, every human activity was judged, not by the standard of the emotions, but by the restrictions of the common law, by precedents. The very pleasures were built upon tradition; he could not amuse himself as he willed without being looked upon askance. And all this atmosphere, odd to say, was not created by the professors, but by the youths of his own age, who were coming up from the great public schools. The young fellow began at once to win the friendship of such of the youngsters as had his own frank habits and ways; and it was at this phase that was born his lifelong friendship with young Horace Malahide.