from them only to enjoy an agitated
delightful afternoon among the shops. Expenditure, always charming,
becomes under these circumstances a sacred and pontifical act. Never had
Mrs. Elsmere bought a teapot for herself with half the fervour which she
now threw into the purchase of Robert's; and the young man, accustomed
to a rather bare home, and an Irish lack of the little elegancies of
life, was overwhelmed when his mother actually dragged him into a
printseller's, and added an engraving or two to the enticing
miscellaneous mass of which he was already master.

They only just left themselves time to rush back to their lodgings and
dress for the solemn function of a dinner with the Provost. The dinner,
however, was a great success. The short, shy manner of their
white-haired host thawed under the influence of Mrs. Elsmere's racy,
unaffected ways, and it was not long before everybody in the room had
more or less made friends with her, and forgiven her her marvellous drab
poplin, adorned with fresh pink ruchings for the occasion. As for the
Provost, Mrs. Elsmere had been told that he was a person of whom she
must inevitably stand in awe. But all her life long she had been like
the youth in the fairy tale who desired to learn how to shiver and could
not attain unto it. Fate had denied her the capacity of standing in awe
of anybody, and she rushed at her host as a new type, delighting in the
thrill which she felt creeping over her when she found herself on the
arm of one who had been the rallying-point of a hundred struggles, and
a centre of influence over thousands of English lives.

And then followed the proud moment when Robert, in his exhibitioner's
gown, took her to service in the chapel on Sunday. The scores of young
faces, the full unison of the hymns, and finally the Provost's sermon,
with its strange brusqueries and simplicities of manner and
phrase--simplicities so suggestive, so full of a rich and yet
disciplined experience, that they haunted her mind for weeks
afterwards--completed the general impression made upon her by the Oxford
life. She came out, tremulous and shaken, leaning on her son's arm. She,
too, like the generations before her, had launched her venture into the
deep. Her boy was putting out from her into the ocean; henceforth she
could but watch him from the shore. Brought into contact with this
imposing University organisation, with all its suggestions of virile
energies and functions, the mother