As for the Provost, Mrs.Elsmere had been told that he was a person of whom she must inevitably stand in awe.

But all her life long she had been like the youth in the fairy tale who desired to learn how to shiver and could not attain unto it.

Fate had denied her the capacity of standing in awe of anybody, and she rushed at her host as a new type, delighting in the thrill which she felt creeping over her when she found herself on the arm of one who had been the rallying-point of a hundred struggles, and a centre of influence over thousands of English lives.
And then followed the proud moment when Robert, in his exhibitioner's gown, took her to service in the chapel on Sunday.

The scores of young faces, the full unison of the hymns, and finally the Provost's sermon, with its strange brusqueries and simplicities of manner and phrase--simplicities suggestive, so full of a rich and yet disciplined experience, that they haunted her mind for weeks afterward--completed the general impression made upon her by the Oxford life.

She came out, tremulous and shaken, leaning on her son's arm.