Yet the lad’s faults were no great matter; he was diffident, placable, passive, unambitious, unenterprising; life did not much attract him; he watched it like a curious and dull exhibition, not much amused, and not tempted in the least to take a part.  He beheld his father ponderously grinding sand, his mother fierily breaking butterflies, his brother labouring at the pleasures of the Hawbuck with the ardour of a soldier in a doubtful battle; and the vital sceptic looked on wondering.  They were careful and troubled about many things; for him there seemed not even one thing needful.  He was born disenchanted, the world’s promises awoke no echo in his bosom, the world’s activities and the world’s distinctions seemed to him equally without a base in fact.  He liked the open air; he liked comradeship, it mattered not with whom, his comrades were only a remedy for solitude.  And he had a taste for painted art.  An array of fine pictures looked upon his childhood, and from these roods of jewelled canvas he received an indelible impression.  The gallery at Stallbridge betokened generations of picture lovers; Norris was perhaps the first of his race to hold the pencil.  The taste was genuine, it grew and strengthened with his growth; and yet he suffered it to be suppressed with scarce a struggle.  Time came for him to go to Oxford, and he resisted faintly.  He was stupid, he said; it was no good to put him through the mill; he wished to be a painter.  The words fell on his father like a thunderbolt, and Norris made haste to give way.  “It didn’t really matter, don’t you know?” said he.  “And it seemed an awful shame to vex the old boy.”

To Oxford he went obediently, hopelessly; and at Oxford became the hero of a certain circle.  He was active and adroit; when he was in the humour, he excelled in many sports; and his singular melancholy detachment gave him a place apart.  He set a fashion in his clique.  Envious undergraduates sought to parody his unaffected lack of zeal and fear; it was a kind of new Byronism more composed and dignified.  “Nothing really mattered”; among other things, this formula embraced the dons; and though he always meant to be civil, the effect on the college authorities was one of startling rudeness.  His indifference cut like insolence; and in some outbreak of his constitutional levity (the complement of his melancholy) he was “sent down” in the middle of the second year.

The event was new in the annals of the Carthews, and Singleton was prepared to make the most of it.  It had been long his practice to prophesy for his second son a career of ruin and disgrace.  There is an advantage in this artless parental habit.  Doubtless the father is interested in his son; but doubtless also the prophet grows to be interested in his prophecies.  If the one goes wrong, the others come true.  Old Carthew drew from this source esoteric consolations; he dwelt at length on his own foresight; he produced variations hitherto unheard from the old theme “I told you so,” coupled his son’s name with the gallows and the hulks, and spoke of his small handful of college debts as though he must raise money on a mortgage to discharge them.