After this the colonel's attitude toward his fellow-boarders was of the stiffest and most repelling sort. They were a good deal surprised at it at first; then, as days passed and it did not soften, they came to regard it as a joke, and though by tacit consent he was let alone, they seemed to harbor no ill feeling toward him. He, on his side, was filled with unappeasable rage. He often passed a meal without speaking to one of them, and never again spent an evening in the parlor.
Up-stairs he abused them to Viola with a violence of phrase that would have amazed them. Even to Mrs. Seymour he permitted himself to indulge his wrath to the extent of biting sarcasms at their expense. The landlady soothed him by assuring him that they were of an inferior class to himself. This was some consolation to the colonel, but he avoided their society with a hauteur which was quite thrown away on them, and his life became lonelier and more purposeless than ever.
Cut off still further from his fellows, longing for, yet afraid to court, the society of his daughter, the old man found himself in a position of distressing isolation. In his dreariness he turned for amusement and solace to the one person left in the house who had neither the self-consciousness to bore, the experience to judge by, nor the cruelty to mock. This was
