As they sat waiting, Boone inquired: "How is Anne—Miss Masters?"
At the mention of the name, Morgan bridled a little, and cast upon him a glance of disapproving scrutiny, but the Colonel, still glancing at the memorandum which he held, replied with no such taint of manner, "Anne's taking a year at college by way of finishing up. I guess you'll miss her after being her guide, counsellor and friend down there in Marlin."
"Yes, sir, I'll miss her."
So he wouldn't even see Anne! Suddenly the city seemed to Boone Wellver a very stifling, unfriendly and inhuman sort of place in which to live.
The new law student could have found no more gracious sponsor or learned savant than was Colonel Tom Wallifarro. He could have found no finer example of the Old South—which was now the New South as well; but one friend, though he be a peerless one, does not rob a new and strange world of its loneliness.
At college, if a boy had sneered, Boone could resent the slur and offer battle; but here there was no discourtesy upon which to seize—only the bleaker and more intangible thing of difference between himself and others—that he himself felt and which he knew others were seeking to conceal—until politeness became a more trying punishment than affront.
He began to feel with a secret sensitiveness contrasts of clothes and manners.
Morgan was consistently polite—but it was a detached politeness which often made Boone's blood quicken to the impulse of belligerent heat. Morgan palpably meant to ignore him with a disdain masked in the habiliments of courtesy. When Boone went reluctantly to dine at Colonel Wallifarro's home he felt himself a barbarian among cultivated people—though that feeling sprang entirely from the new sensitiveness. As a matter of fact, he bore himself with a self-possessed dignity which Colonel Wallifarro later characterized as "the conduct of a gentleman reduced to its simplest and most natural terms."
But for the most part of that first winter in town his life, outside the office, was the life of the boarding house in downtown Third Street; the life of slovenly but highly respectable women with a penchant for cheap gossip; of bickerings overheard through division walls; of disappointed men who should, they were assured, if life stood on all fours with justice, be dwelling in their own houses. In short, it was the dreary existence of unalleviated obscurity.