Presently they fell on the subject of Oxford.
'Once,' she said. 'I went with my father one summer term. I have only, a confused memory of it--of the quadrangles, and a long street, a great building with a dome, and such beautiful trees!'
'No; never toward the later part of his life'--and her clear eyes clouded a little, 'nothing made him so sad as the thought of Oxford.'
She paused, as though she had strayed on to a topic where expression was a little difficult. Then his big face and clerical dress seemed somehow to reassure her, and she began again, though reluctantly.
'He used to say that it was all so changed. The young fellows he saw when he went back scorned everything he cared for. Every visit to Oxford was like a stab to him. It seemed to him as if the place was full of men 'Who only wanted to destroy and break down everything that was sacred to him.'
Elsmere reflected that Richard Leyburn must have left Oxford about the beginning of the Liberal reaction, which followed Tractarianism, and in twenty years transformed the University.
'Ah!' he said, smiling gently. 'He should have lived a little longer. There is another turn of the tide since then. The destructive wave has spent itself, and at Oxford now many of us feel ourselves on the upward swell of a religious revival.'
Catherine looked up at him with a sweet sympathetic look. That dim vision of Oxford, with its gray, tree-lined walls, lay very near to her heart for her father's sake. And the keen face above her seemed to satisfy and respond to her inner feeling.
'I know the High Church influence is very strong,' she said, hesitating; 'but I don't know whether father would have liked that much better.'
The last words had slipped out of her, and she checked herself suddenly. Robert saw that she was uncertain as to his opinions, and afraid lest she might have said something discourteous.
'It is not only the High Church influence,' he said quickly, 'it is a mixture of influences from all sorts of quarters that has brought about the new state of things. Some of the factors in the change were hardly Christian at all, by name, but they have all helped to make men think, to stir their hearts, to win them back to the old ways.'