She would have preferred Oxford as the arena of his struggles and trials, because her father and brother had both belonged to one of the colleges there. But then it was more expensive, add every sovereign had to be looked at.
Young Leverall was persevering and studious; he was therefore successful. He returned in triumph, while his mother stifled him with embraces.
Bertha, who was sternly classical, crowned him with a wreath of laurels. Then she gazed at his black and silvery hair, from which the green leaves peeped forth here and there like Dryads sporting in a dark cave.
She gazed at his soft hazel eyes, and at his cheeks, which care and thought had made so pale. Unable to restrain her inexpressible love, she flung her arms round his neck, and kissed him and toyed with his hair till the leaves fell one by one crumpled to the ground.
Mrs. Leverall shook her head, and then burst into tears; she saw it was a bad omen. Her son and daughter laughed at her, for these superstitions are only cherished by children and the aged, as shadows are longest and darkest in the morn and in the eve.
With the little which he had earned from alma mater, and with the little which his own mother could afford to give him, he was able to pay his college fees, his room rent, his kitchen bills, and to buy himself clothes. But he was obliged to be very economical, and it was this very economy which drove him within himself and to habits of solitude.
At first fresh from school, where his mother’s straitened means had not prevented him from joining in the amusements of his fellows, he would sometimes pause in his work and look and listen with something of envy to the windows which were blazing with light and to the gay laughter, and the loud chorus of the bacchanalian song.
Soon, however, he learned to despise these boisterous pleasures, for he discovered from the faces and words of their voteries that they, despite their forced uproarious merriment, were not so happy as himself.
He would have become a misanthrope had not his heart been touched by a gentler and more refined influence.
A new spirit seemed to seize him. It did not descend in the shape of a vulture or a raven, as it descends upon fanatics and bigots—if it ever descends upon them at all—but rather in the form of a white and gentle dove.