He was in a new world.
He suddenly found, to his surprise, that there was that which gave him position amongst the undergraduates which had been completely ignored amongst the intellectual Bohemians. These others had taken him on his merits—he was now taken on the merit of his family. He found that the important thing was not as to what he was, but as to what his father was. He was given his place and his measure of pleasantnesses largely in the degree of his social position. He awoke to the fact that he had a social position—a rung on a long ladder, reaching up to dignity and the smiles of the dignified others.
The atmosphere here was wholly different. It was less literary, more academic; less intellectual, more scholastic; less original, more conventional; less artistic, more grammatic—life, literature, art, every human activity was judged, not by the standard of the emotions, but by the restrictions of the common law, by precedents. The very pleasures were built upon tradition; he could not amuse himself as he willed without being looked upon askance. And all this atmosphere, odd to say, was not created by the professors, but by the youths of his own age, who were coming up from the great public schools.
The young fellow began at once to win the friendship of such of the youngsters as had his own frank habits and ways; and it was at this phase that was born his lifelong friendship with young Horace Malahide.
Everything in the relation of his fellows to him was done through an atmosphere. His first term threw him into nodding acquaintance with two or three young peers of his own year, and with youngsters who were the sons of county magnates—several of them indeed county magnates themselves. These young fellows he found to be friendly and genial to a certain point, when suddenly they stepped into another atmosphere from which he was subtly excluded. It was done by the most delicate of tricks, and was chiefly made apparent by their manner towards another in their own atmosphere as in comparison with their manner towards him. He noticed the youngsters who had been school-friends at the great public schools, now drifted apart, shifted their affection, stepped quietly away from their old association and habits, and were swallowed each into a well-defined set....
When, however, Noll returned to Oxford for his second term he found himself in a new atmosphere. One of the young peers walked into his rooms as an intimate friend—accosted him with the heartiness that showed him he had passed into the set—he was the same youth—the other was the same youth—something had chanced, and changed the attitude.
Noll bent his big brows upon it, resenting it as an impertinence. But the others were equally urbane, friendly—yet not a word passed—there was nothing to make the excuse for a resentment.
He only knew some while afterwards that Lord Wyntwarde had asked the youth, meeting him in the hunting-field, if a young cousin of his, one Noll Baddlesmere, were not up at Magdalen with him. The youth had passed the word quite subtly. Gentlemen should never do vulgar things vulgarly.
Noll thenceforth moved in the set, and its allied sets. He breathed the atmosphere. But being an airy person, of kindly and genial nature, he was not by way of examining into motives, nor of very strictly carrying out the subtle hints of the others in the Atmosphere; thus it came about that he dove-tailed several cliques that would otherwise have practised a more rigid exclusiveness towards each other.
And he carried with him, into the most exclusive groups of young nobles, amongst whom he was soon well-liked, his genial friend Horace Malahide....