Ravenshoe. By Henry Kingsley.

CHARLES AT" THE UNIVERSITY. 43
CHAPTER VII.
IN WIHCH CHARLES AND LORD WELTER DISTINGUISH THEMSELVES AT THE UNIVERSITY.
IT is a curious sensation, that of meeting, as a young man of two
or three and twenty, a man one has last seen as a little lad of ten,
or thereabouts. One is almost in a way disappointed. You may
be asked out to dinner to meet a man called, say, Jones (or if you
like the name better, Delamere d'Eresby), whom you believe
to be your old friend Jones, and whom you have not seen for a
month or so; and on getting to the house find it is not your Jones
at all, but another Jones whom you don't know. He may be
cleverer, handsomer, more agreeable than your old friend, — a
man whom you are glad to know; and yet you are disappointed.
You don't meet the man you expected, and are rather disposed to
be prejudiced against his representative.
So it is when you meet a friend in manhood whom you have
not seen since you were at school. You have been picturing to
yourself the sort of man your friend must have developed into,
and you find him different from what you thought. So, instead
of foregathering with an old friend, you discover that you have to
make a new acquaintance.
You will now have to resume the acquaintance of Charles
Ravenshoe at two and twenty. I hope you will not be much
disappointed in him. He was a very nice boy, if you remember,
and you will see immediately that he has developed into a very
nice young man indeed. It is possible that I may not be about to
introduce him to you under the most favorable circumstances;
but he created those circumstances for himself, and must abide
by them. As it is not my intention to follow him through any part
of his University life, but only to resume his history when he
quits it, so it becomes imperatively necessary upon me to state,
without any sort of disguise, the reason why he did leave it. And,
as two or three other important characters in the story had something to do with it, I shall do so more at length than would at first
seem necessary.
It was nine o'clock on the 6th of November. The sun, which
had been doing duty for her Majesty all night at Calcutta, Sydney,
&c., had by this time reached Oxford, and was shining aslant into
two pretty little Gothic windows in the inner, or library quadrangle of St. Paul's College, and illuminating the features of a