Durant they were intolerable. For limbs that had roamed the world to
be tucked up under the Colonel's whist table, for a mind equally
vigorous and vagrant to be tied to the apron-strings of the
Colonel's intellect, was really a refinement of torture. Thrice
Durant had tried to find an exit into the surrounding landscape, and
thrice the Colonel had been too quick for him. He hovered
perpetually round him; he watched his goings-out and his comings-in;
there was no escaping his devilish ingenuity. While Durant was
looking for a stick or a hat, he would secure him softly by the arm
and lead him out for a stroll. He would say, "My dear Durant, the
women are all very well in their way, but it is a luxury to have
another man to talk to." He talked to Durant, leaning toward him
lover-like, with the awful passion of the bore for his victim.

These strolls extended over several miles, without taking them
beyond the bounds of Coton Manor. Durant began to disbelieve in the
existence of a world beyond. Coton Manor had swallowed up the
county; it seemed to have opened its gates and swallowed him up,
too.

He told himself that he had done nothing to deserve his doom. He was
not more selfish or more exacting than other men; he was not
sensual; he had not made mere physical pleasure his being's end and
aim. He had been content with a somewhat negative ideal, the mere
avoidance of boredom. He never struggled or argued with it, but
whenever and wherever he met it he had simply packed his portmanteau
and gone away. This repugnance of his had entailed endless
traveling, but Durant was a born traveler. Hitherto his life had
been free from any care beyond the trouble of avoiding trouble. But
he had been lax in this matter of Coton Manor; he had had reason
enough to suppose that the visit would bring him face to face with
the thing he feared, and he had rushed into the adventure with open
arms. And now, this horror that he had eluded so successfully for
seven years he was to know more intimately than his own soul; he was
to sound all the depths beyond depths of boredom. He had stayed in
dull places before, but their dulness struck him now as naif and
entertaining by comparison. Other people lapsed helplessly into
dulness; at Coton Manor they cultivated it; they kept it up. What
was worse, they took it for granted in other people. It never seemed
to occur to Miss Tancred or the Colonel that Maurice Durant could be
interesting, that he had