“It is all in a single word, Mr. Ware,” she proceeded, in low tones.  “I speak for others as well as myself, mind you—­we find that you are a bore.”

Theron’s stiffened countenance remained immovable.  He continued to stare unblinkingly up into her eyes.

“We were disposed to like you very much when we first knew you,” Celia went on.  “You impressed us as an innocent, simple, genuine young character, full of mother’s milk.  It was like the smell of early spring in the country to come in contact with you.  Your honesty of nature, your sincerity in that absurd religion of yours, your general naivete of mental and spiritual get-up, all pleased us a great deal.  We thought you were going to be a real acquisition.”

“Just a moment—­whom do you mean by ’we’?” He asked the question calmly enough, but in a voice with an effect of distance in it.

“It may not be necessary to enter into that,” she replied.  “Let me go on.  But then it became apparent, little by little, that we had misjudged you.  We liked you, as I have said, because you were unsophisticated and delightfully fresh and natural.  Somehow we took it for granted you would stay so.  Rut that is just what you didn’t do—­just what you hadn’t the sense to try to do.  Instead, we found you inflating yourself with all sorts of egotisms and vanities.  We found you presuming upon the friendships which had been mistakenly extended to you.  Do you want instances?  You went to Dr. Ledsmar’s house that very day after I had been with you to get a piano at Thurston’s, and tried to inveigle him into talking scandal about me.  You came to me with tales about him.  You went to Father Forbes, and sought to get him to gossip about us both.  Neither of those men will ever ask you inside his house again.  But that is only one part of it.  Your whole mind became an unpleasant thing to contemplate.  You thought it would amuse and impress us to hear you ridiculing and reviling the people of your church, whose money supports you, and making a mock of the things they believe in, and which you for your life wouldn’t dare let them know you didn’t believe in.  You talked to us slightingly about your wife.  What were you thinking of, not to comprehend that that would disgust us?  You showed me once—­do you remember?—­a life of George Sand that you had just bought,—­bought because you had just discovered that she had an unclean side to her life.  You chuckled as you spoke to me about it, and you were for all the world like a little nasty boy, giggling over something dirty that older people had learned not to notice.  These are merely random incidents.  They are just samples, picked hap-hazard, of the things in you which have been opening our eyes, little by little, to our mistake.  I can understand that all the while you really fancied that you were expanding, growing, in all directions.  What you took to be improvement was degeneration.  When you thought that you were impressing us most by your smart sayings and doings, you were reminding us most of the fable about the donkey trying to play lap-dog.  And it wasn’t even an honest, straightforward donkey at that!”