as a
full reality. His first impression of them had merged gradually into
his present one, though there had been well-marked stages on the
route.

At the beginning, the Ketterings' interpretation of hospitality had
been indicated by the quantity of food provided; the incessant
pressing him to eat had been a special attention to him, and his
refusal had been taken first as mere ceremony--natural on the part of
a gentleman--and next as somewhat of a slight. And in proportion as he
became less of a novelty to them, so did they resume their normal mode
of life. By the time the fact of his being their guest had ceased to
occupy the centre of their consciousness breakfast had become reduced
to coffee--of the same curious flavour--and thick bread and butter,
tea to the same astringent beverage as before and thin bread and
butter, the two other repasts of the day being likewise administered
with a due regard for economy. Mrs. Kettering, too, no longer
enumerated the contents of the larder in the hope of tempting him with
some delicacy that was not on the table. The trim servant girl who had
waited so staidly and respectfully at table had now developed into a
perfect slattern who had the habit of answering her mistress back,
sometimes in a way that almost amounted to bullying, and who seemed to
have as much to say in the concerns of the family as any one of its
members. The kitchen, too, obtruded and occupied the foreground of
life.

Morgan did not, on account of this change, which he knew did not
signify any falling off in hospitable feeling, and which, indeed, he
rather appreciated so far as the reduced fare was concerned, reverse
his judgment that he had fallen among kind-hearted folk. It had been a
strain on them to maintain an appearance of gentility, and their
recoil had been merely that of a stretched piece of elastic. He had
lost his importance as a special person, and was now only just one of
them. He understood that the family was exactly what it had to
be, that its temperament and mode of life were perfectly attuned; yet,
for him, there were a thousand unseizable roughnesses that depressed
his spirit. Though the Ketterings and he spoke the same mother-tongue,
words bore different values for him, and full communion was
impossible.

But his estimation of them was more of the nature of passive mental
apprehension than of active criticism. He himself, however, had been
criticised and he knew it, for Alice and Mary h