done anything worth mentioning. Not that he
was sensitive to their opinion, it was simply that this attitude of
theirs appealed unpleasantly to his imagination, giving it a cold
foretaste of extinction. It was as if his flaming intellectual
youth, with all its achievements, had been dropped into the dark,
where such things are forgotten. At Coton Manor his claim to
distinction rested on the fact that he was the Colonel's godson. The
Colonel had appropriated, absorbed him, swallowed him up.

The fact that Durant was lapped in material comfort only intensified
his spiritual pangs. The Tancreds were rich, and their wealth was
not of to-day or yesterday; they had the dim golden tone, the deep
opulence of centuries. And they were generous, they gave him of
their best; so that, besides being bored, he had the additional
discomfort of feeling himself a bit of a brute. As he lay awake
night after night in his luxurious bed he wondered how he ever got
there, what on earth had induced him to accept their invitation. He
cursed his infernal rashness, his ungovernable optimism; he had
spent half his life in jumping at conclusions and at things, and the
other half in jumping away from them, however difficult the backward
leap. He had jumped at the Colonel's invitation.

To tell the truth, he would have jumped at anybody's at the time.

When he came back from his travels he had found himself a stranger
in his own country. In every place he touched he had left new
friends most agreeably disconsolate at his departure; he supposed
(rashly again) that the old ones would be overjoyed at his return.
As it happened, his reception in England was not cold exactly, but
temperate, like the climate, and Durant had found both a little
trying after the fervors and ardors of the South. The poor fellow
had spent his first week at home in hansoms, rushing passionately
from one end of London to the other, looking up his various
acquaintances. He was disappointed, not to say disgusted, with the
result. (Maurice Durant was always disgusted when other people
failed to come up to his expectations.) His best friends were out of
town, his second best were only too much in it. Many of them had
abjured art and taken to stiff collars and conventions. He called on
these at their offices. They were all diabolically busy in the
morning and insufferably polite in the afternoon; they had flung him
a nod or a smile or a "Glad to see you back again, old fellow," an