Gradually he came to take a more real interest in his neighbour. The books that Sutton read, Sutton's love of poetry--surprised him; little things he would say now and then seemed to show indications of sensitive fancies and shy feelings hardly in accordance with his dry exterior. What a thing it would be for him, Foley thought, if the poor young man's taste could be really cultivated; if he could only be set free from his narrowing ideas and made to look at life for himself, instead of seeing it always through the grey fog of Puritan prejudice!
Sutton took everything that Foley said with delightful seriousness; the well-worn arguments against Democracy and Republicanism were new to him, and seemed to puzzle him--he would come days afterwards with carefully thought-out answers to them. Or he would give his friend tracts to read, as if he was worried by Foley's ritualistic tastes, and hoped to convert him to Methodism; and once he persuaded him to go and hear Dr. Joseph preach. Foley was really impressed by the good sense and vigour of Sutton's master, but to Sutton himself he criticized what he thought a want of beauty in the service.
And it was only once that Foley felt even for a moment the least uncomfortable about the things he said to his friend--one evening when he happened to run upstairs with some specious argument about the Apostolic Succession, (for when an idea occurred to him he liked to make use of it at once,) and going into the American's room, he found him on his knees in prayer.
In that old place--for St. Mary's was not one of the more liberal Colleges, but a sleepy, ancient, aristocratic society, very conservative of its own beliefs and manners and prejudices--Eliaphet Sutton lived on at first, unknown to almost everybody, and only noticed for the oddness of his looks, as he went in and out to his lectures or solitary walks. But after a while Foley's interest in him, and his own shy charm of manner, gained him a more friendly welcome in the College, and little by little he began to modify, it was remarked, the quaint unconventionalities of his speech and ways.
A curious life it was, this Oxford life into which the inexperienced American had chanced to drift! A community of young men, generously bred and taught, living together so intimately in that mediaeval place, with its own old usages and traditions and ways of thinking; shut out, as by a high wall, from the world outside; aloof from the vulgar needs of life; concerned, many of them, only with its theoretic problems, interested more, perhaps, in the ancient Greeks than in contemporary affairs--and, indeed, not unlike the Greeks in their care for the clearness and beauty of the mind, the athletic strength of the body--surely, Foley thought, the young Methodist could not have found so delightful a place in all the world beside.