That he made a greater success than his self-depreciation would imply is evident from the fact that his Fellowship was renewed for the next year.
But the truth is that the world was tugging at Page more insistently than the cloister.

"Speaking grammatically," writes Prof.E.G.

Sihler, one of Page's fellow students of that time, in his "Confessions and Convictions of a Classicist," "Page was interested in that one of the main tenses which we call the Present." In his after life, amid all the excitements of journalism, Page could take a brief vacation and spend it with Ulysses by the sea; but actuality and human activity charmed him even more than did the heroes of the ancient world.

He went somewhat into Baltimore society, but not extensively; he joined a club whose membership comprised the leading intellectual men of the town; probably his most congenial associations, however, came of the Saturday night meetings of the fellows in Hopkins Hall, where, over pipes and steins of beer, they passed in review all the questions of the day.

Page was still the Southern boy, with the strange notions about the North and Northern people which were the inheritance of many years' misunderstandings.