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. But to Boone it was something else. In his third-floor room was a window and a gas jet. The window looked across to another world where, behind a fine old sycamore that took on alluring colour of bole and bark and leaf, stood a club through whose colonial doors men like Morgan Wallifarro went in and out. At night too that mean room was to him sanctuary, for then there was the gas jet, and the gas jet stood, to a cabin-bred boy, for adventuring into all the world of literature of which McCalloway had talked. Boone had the list written down, and the public library had the books. So while the couple in the next room debated the question of separation and divorce, their voices carrying stridently through lath and plaster, Boone was ranging the world with Darwin, with Suetonius and his "Lives of the Caesars," with the whole bright-panoplied crew: Plutarch, Thackeray, Dumas, Stevenson, Macaulay, and Kipling. Then, too, there were visits to the jail where a kinsman lay in durance. But when summer came he heaved a sigh of vast relief. As the train took him back through flat beargrass and swelling bluegrass, through the beginnings of the hills, where he saw the first log booms in the rivers--his heart seemed to expand and his lungs to broaden out and drink deep where they had been only sipping before. Dutifully and promptly upon his arrival at the McCalloway cabin, Boone went over to see Happy, and as he drew near, for all the assurance of a courage, by no means brittle, he halted in the road and braced himself before he crossed the stile. To go there was something of an ordeal. To stay away, without making the effort, would leave him guiltily recreant to an old friendship which, on one side, had been love.