o bore him, at any rate it would not be by
her conversation. Some plain women he had known who had overcome
plainness by vivacity and charm. Not so Miss Tancred. Being plainer
than most she was bound to make a more than ordinary effort, yet she
had adopted the ways of a consummately pretty woman who knows that
nothing further is required of her. Did she think that he would go
on forever battering his brains to create conversation out of
nothing, when she clearly intimated that it was not worth her while
to help him? Never in his life had he met a woman who inspired him
with such invincible repugnance. He found himself talking to her at
random like a man in a dream, and so indifferent to her opinion that
he was not in the least distressed at his own imbecility; and Miss
Tancred, like a lady in a dream, seemed to find his attitude
entirely natural; perhaps she had read a similar antagonism in the
faces of other men. (As it happened, repugnance was an emotion that
Durant had frequently felt before, and certain emphatic lines about
his nose and mouth had apparently been drawn there on purpose to
express it.) Anyhow, Miss Tancred made no attempt to engage his
attention, but turned her dull eyes to the Colonel, as if appealing
to him to take the burden of Durant's entertainment on his own
shoulders.

This the Colonel was perfectly prepared to do. It was evidently an
understood thing that Miss Tancred should sit there, in that
depressing attitude, while her father monopolized their guest.
Durant hastily classified his host and hostess as the bore active
and the bore passive. If Miss Tancred had ever had any interest or
property in life she seemed to have made it over to the Colonel,
together with a considerable portion of her youth. The Colonel wore
his sixty years well out of sight, like an undergarment; you even
felt that there might be something slightly indecorous in the
suggestion that he wore them at all. He was alive to the
finger-tips, alive in every feature of his aristocratic little face.
He seemed at first rather uncertain how to take Durant, and looked
him up and down as if in search of a convenient button-hole; he
smiled innocently on the young man (Durant soon learned to know and
dread that smile); nothing could have been more delicate and
tentative than his approach. He had been silent for the last few
minutes, lying low behind a number of the _Nineteenth Century_, for
if he were a bore he had the dangerous po