By degrees he shunned the intercourse which had for him nothing but
distress, and his volatile acquaintances were perhaps the first to set
him the example. Often in his solitary walks he stopped afar off to
gaze upon the sports which none ever solicited him to share; and as
the shout of laughter and of happy hearts came, peal after peal, upon
his ear, he turned enviously, yet not malignantly away, with tears,
which not all his pride could curb, and muttered to himself, "And
these, these hate me!"

There are two feelings common to all high or affectionate natures,--
that of extreme susceptibility to opinion and that of extreme
bitterness at its injustice. These feelings were Mordaunt's: but the
keen edge which one blow injures, the repetition blunts; and by little
and little, Algernon became not only accustomed, but, as he persuaded
himself, indifferent, to his want of popularity; his step grew more
lofty, and his address more collected, and that which was once
diffidence gradually hardened into pride.

His residence at the University was neither without honour nor profit.
A college life was then, as now, either the most retired or the most
social of all others; we need scarcely say which it was to Mordaunt,
but his was the age when solitude is desirable, and when the closet
forms the mind better than the world. Driven upon itself, his
intellect became inquiring and its resources profound; admitted to
their inmost recesses, he revelled among the treasures of ancient
lore, and in his dreams of the Nymph and Naiad, or his researches
after truth in the deep wells of the Stagyrite or the golden fountains
of Plato, he forgot the loneliness of his lot and exhausted the
hoarded enthusiasm of his soul.