asked if it
rained, or if collections took place on such and such a day, it was pain
and grief to him to have to affirm positively, without qualifications,
that so it was.

Such a man was not very likely, one would have thought, to captivate
an ardent, impulsive boy like Elsmere. Edward Langham, however,
notwithstanding undergraduate tales, was a very remarkable person. In
the first place, he was possessed of exceptional personal beauty. His
coloring was vividly black and white, closely curling jet-black hair
and fine black eyes contrasting with a pale, clear complexion and even,
white teeth. So far he had the characteristics which certain Irishmen
share with most Spaniards. But the Celtic or Iberian brilliance was
balanced by a classical delicacy and precision of feature. He had the
brow, the nose, the upper lip, the finely-molded chin, which belong to
the more severe and spiritual Greek type. Certainly of Greek blitheness
and directness there was no trace. The eye was wavering and profoundly
melancholy; all the movements of the tall, finely-built frame were
hesitating and doubtful. It was as though the man were suffering from
paralysis of some moral muscle or other; as if some of the normal
springs of action in him had been profoundly and permanently weakened.

He had a curious history. He was the only child of a doctor in a
Lincolnshire country town. His old parents had brought him up in strict
provincial ways, ignoring the boy's idiosyncrasies as much as possible.
They did not want an exceptional and abnormal son, and they tried to put
down his dreamy, self-conscious habits by forcing him into the common,
middle-class Evangelical groove. As soon as he got to college, however,
the brooding, gifted nature had a moment of sudden and, as it seemed to
the old people in Gainsborough, most reprehensible expansion. Poems were
sent to them, cut out of one or the other of the leading periodicals,
with their son's initials appended, and articles of philosophical
art-criticism, published while the boy was still an undergraduate--which
seemed to the stern father everything that was sophistical and
subversive. For they treated Christianity itself as an open question,
and showed especially scant respect for the "Protestantism of the
Protestant religion." The father warned him grimly that he was not
going to spend his hard-earned savings on the support of a free-thinking
scribbler, and the young man wrote no more till just after