He did not do as much as he might have done in the more intellectual ways of academical distinction.
Still, he was always among the first in the college examinations; he won two university prizes, and took a very creditable degree, after which he returned home, more odd, more saturnine--in short, less like other people--than when he had left Merton School.

He had woven a solitude round him out of his own heart, and in that solitude he sat still and watchful as a spider sits in his web.
Whether from natural temperament or from his educational training under such teachers as Mr.Mivers, who carried out the new ideas of reform by revering nothing in the past, and Mr.Welby, who accepted the routine of the present as realistic, and pooh-poohed all visions of the future as idealistic, Kenelm's chief mental characteristic was a kind of tranquil indifferentism.

It was difficult to detect in him either of those ordinary incentives to action,--vanity or ambition, the yearning for applause or the desire of power.

To all female fascinations he had been hitherto star-proof.

He had never experienced love, but he had read a good deal about it; and that passion seemed to him an unaccountable aberration of human reason, and an ignominious surrender of the equanimity of thought which it should be the object of masculine natures to maintain undisturbed.