Everything in the relation of his fellows to him was done through an atmosphere. His first term threw him into nodding acquaintance with two or three young peers of his own year, and with youngsters who were the sons of county magnates--several of them indeed county magnates themselves. These young fellows he found to be friendly and genial to a certain point, when suddenly they stepped into another atmosphere from which he was subtly excluded. It was done by the most delicate of tricks, and was chiefly made apparent by their manner towards another in their own atmosphere as in comparison with their manner towards him. He noticed the youngsters who had been school-friends at the great public schools, now drifted apart, shifted their affection, stepped quietly away from their old association and habits, and were swallowed each into a well-defined set.... When, however, Noll returned to Oxford for his second term he found himself in a new atmosphere. One of the young peers walked into his rooms as an intimate friend--accosted him with the heartiness that showed him he had passed into the set--he was the same youth--the other was the same youth--something had chanced, and changed the attitude. Noll bent his big brows upon it, resenting it as an impertinence. But the others were equally urbane, friendly--yet not a word passed--there was nothing to make the excuse for a resentment. He only knew some while afterwards that Lord Wyntwarde had asked the youth, meeting him in the hunting-field, if a young cousin of his, one Noll Baddlesmere, were not up at Magdalen with him. The youth had passed the word quite subtly. Gentlemen should never do vulgar things vulgarly. Noll thenceforth moved in _the_ set, and its allied sets. He breathed _the_ atmosphere. But being an airy person, of kindly and genial nature, he was not by way of examining into motives, nor of very strictly carrying out the subtle hints of the others in the Atmosphere; thus it came about that he dove-tailed several cliques that would otherwise have practised a more rigid exclusiveness towards each other. And he carried with him, into the most exclusive groups of young nobles, amongst whom he was soon well-liked, his genial friend Horace Malahide.... Noll’s career at Oxford was a short one. He nearly got through his first year. A certain superficial cleverness laid the gin for the lad’s fall. His taste in literary expression had been cultivated to a brilliancy beyond his years by association with the witty Bohemians, and by the reading of good work; it had, above all, been developed by the artistic guidance of Eustace Lovegood. The lad therefore now found it difficult to wade through the cheap academic facetiousness and thin style of the literary ventures that exploited in dullard local reviews the anæmic wit which passed for fiery originality amongst the undergraduates, and mistook itself for a revolutionary upheaval in their puerile and stupid magazines.