These small hereditary feelings set James Darnley’s son apart from his contemporaries, and it only required the remains of middle-class prudishness to achieve his isolation. Kingston found it impossible, in spite of habit and effort, to acquire the easy personal _sans-gêne_, the tripping, untrammelled tongue of his contemporaries. He did his best; listened genially, accumulated anecdotes and retailed them among his friends; but always heavily, never as to the manner born. His friends held the free, frank language only possible to the perfectly cleanly mind, naked and unashamed; he, for his part, was always uneasy in his nudity, and took his share in the talk with that consciousness of impropriety that doubles impropriety. The Dadd respectability still hampered its rebellious descendant, and prevented him from ever entering into perfect harmony with that world where decency is a matter of conduct, not by any means of language. On this point his aunt Minne-Adélaïde had certainly the advantage. But the woman is proverbially more adaptable than the man. Still isolated, then, at home and abroad, Kingston came down at last from Oxford at twenty-four, a character untried, unformed, unground by any real contact with the mills of life. An inordinate sensitiveness to impressions, an excessive personal daintiness, were the marks of his nature at that time, so far as a friend could discern it. For the rest, very pleasant of look and temper, friendly, honest, and no more selfish than a good-looking young fellow of four-and-twenty has every right to be. Lady Adela was delighted to receive him under her wing once more, and noticed with joy the subsidence of some of his more tumultuous ideas into tranquillity. She had a fearful notion that everyone left Oxford ‘a roaring atheist,’ and it was a great joy to her that Kingston completely disproved this fallacy, not only by accompanying her to church, but also by carrying her hymn-book. She devoted herself to exploiting her son, and he, not finding rebellion necessary for his pleasure, allowed himself to be guided wherever his mother wished.