Oliver suited the action to the word, flung off his coat, bared his long sinewy arms to the shoulders, advanced to the vacant board, and laid hold of the dough fast becoming flat and unprofitable. In spite of his passion he felt shy and awkward under the consciousness of the adverse, critical eyes glancing at him, some of them in sheer amazement, some of them in jealous resentment, some of them in sly amusement, and only a very few of them in dubious generous approbation. He distrusted his qualifications with reason. But when was he not awkward? and it was surely possible for a man of his muscle and modicum of experience to knead dough into a passable condition and dispose of it in an oven. As Oliver solemnly pounded at his lump of dough, he was assailed mentally by successive trains of thought, contradictory, sympathetic, purely humorous. In the first place he was angrily sensible of the same momentary rush of shamefacedness, in trying to bake before his bakers, that he had felt in first standing in his shop-door before his fellow-townsmen—yet what was there in this fine, white flour, powdering him and his companions alike, to stain a man with so disgraceful a stain that in the case of poor Neaves, the very reflection of it caused the weak undergraduate to leap into the Isis in order to wash out the blot and his miserable life with it? Was the mark so much more invidious than the soil which Neaves’s quondam companions had been fain enough to contract from the earth of hunting fields, or the soil of stables and kennels, or the mire of race-courses, or even the smoke and blood of a battle-field—to pass through which without ‘falling into a funk,’ if the chance came his way, without any deed of his, constituted every young man a hero? Why should the mere inference of having to do with wheat as it was made into bread to feed the multitudes, operate more violently upon men’s stupid, snobbish prejudices than the report of being mixed up with barley in the course of becoming malt, or with hops as they passed into ale—to form refreshment for the thirsty, no doubt? But the refreshment was decidedly open to abuse when the great distillers and brewers might also be the great licensed victuallers, the invisible, irresponsible landlords of scores and hundreds of gin-palaces and ale-houses, as well as the builders of churches and founders of schools. Oliver had a fleeting vision of Mrs. Hilliard’s cool, fresh drawing-room in contrast to the hot vapour-laden bakehouse, with Catherine Hilliard bidding men fight or die, or speak and witness for the truth—but never mix flour, yeast and salt, and convert leaven into wholesome bread, to fill the mouths and recruit the strength of hungry, fainting creatures.