“Well,” said Mr. Betts, “I’ll get the dollar, anyway.”
He made a playfully frenzied lunge for the coin. But Charley Ryan had anticipated the movement, and his hand struck it first. An animated tussle ensued, during which Miss Mercer averted a catastrophe by removing the lamp.
“Lord! Lord!” cried Mrs. Betts, querulously, “what under the canopy possesses them? It’s like living in a bear-garden.”
The struggle ended with the triumph of Charley Ryan, who, with an exaggerated bow and an affectation of the colonel’s manner, presented his trophy to Mrs. Betts. She took it, threw it into her work-basket, and said snappishly:
“The old man gets that to-morrow. I ain’t goin’ into the hold-up business.”
After this the colonel’s attitude toward his fellow-boarders was of the stillest 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 Corinne, Mrs. Seymour’s little girl, a grave, large-eyed, lean-shanked child of eight.
The alternate spoiling and scolding that the boarders awarded her had developed in Corinne a chill disbelief in human nature. As a rule she held off from those about her who would one day buy her kisses with a bag of candy, and the next, when she was singing to her doll on the balcony, would box her ears for making a noise. The vagaries of humanity were a mystery to her, and she had already acquired a cautious philosophy, the main tenet of which was to go her own way without demand or appeal to her fellow-creatures.