Transplanted by Gertrude Atherton — Read

Cecil, some five months after his eighteenth birthday, went up to Oxford and entered Balliol. Here he gave the cold shoulder to cricket, and took to the water with the enthusiasm of a man who has the honour of his college to uphold and his blue to get. He also took more kindly to correspondence, and wrote Lee long letters on the tendencies of modern civilisation. His letters struck his friend, used to the lighter mood of Mr. Montgomery and Mr. Brannan, as decidedly priggish, and she worried over the development not a little, -- being unaware that the University youth of Great Britain must take priggishness in the regular course of measles, mumps, whooping-cough, Public School wickedness, the overwhelming discovery of his own importance as an atom of the British Empire, and cynicism.

During the second term he became profoundly and theologically religious, and Lee wept at the prospect of being a parson's wife. His excursions into the vast echoing region of spiritual mysteries nearly addled her brains, and she felt quite miserable at times to think that there was so little of the old Cecil left. But during the spring of his second year there seemed to be a healthy reaction. A letter dated from Maundrell Abbey informed Lee that he had been sent down for breaking windows and attempting to feed a bonfire in the quadrangle with an objectionable don. He further confided that upon the last hilarious night before his exile he had been discovered by a good Samaritan at the foot of his stairs calling imperiously upon the Almighty to carry him up to his room and put him to bed.