With the town, too, he was an "outsider." The men at the Club thought him a bore--a person of strange enthusiasms and alarming heresies. By the ladies he was considered rough: as Mrs. le Terry had put it to Miss Ponsonby, he was a kind of too terrible bushranger without the romance! He was gauche, he knew, and he hated the tea-parties. They talked about things of which he knew nothing; he was too sincere to cover his convictions with the fatuous chatter that passed, in Fallacy Street society, for brilliant wit. That it was fatuous he was convinced, but his conviction made matters no easier for him. But his attitude to the town had been, it must be confessed, from the very first a challenge. He had expected things that were not there; he had thought that his dreams were realities, and when he had demanded golden colours and had been shown stuff of sombre grey, there had been wild rebellion and impatient discontent with the world. He had thought Pendragon amazing in its utter disregard of the things that were to him necessities, but he had forgotten that he himself despised so completely things that were to Pendragon essentials. He had asked for beauty and they had given him an Esplanade; he had searched for romance and had discovered the new hotel; he dreamed of the sand and blue water of the Cove and had awaked to find the place despised and contemned--a site for future boarding-houses. The town had thought him at first entertaining; they had made allowances for a certain rather picturesque absurdity consequent on backwoods and the friendship of Maories--men had laughed at the Club and detailed Harry Trojan's latest with added circumstances and incident, and for a while this was amusing. But his vehemence knew no pause, and he stated his disgust at the practical spirit of the new Pendragon with what seemed to the choice spirits at the Club effrontery. They smiled and then they sneered, and at last they left him alone. So Harry found himself, at the end of the first week after his return, alone in Pendragon. He had not, perhaps, cared for their rejection. He had come, like Gottwalt in _Flegejahre_, "loving every dog, and wishing that every dog should love him"--but he had seen, at once, that his way must be apart from theirs, and in that knowledge he had tried to find the comfort of a minority certain of its own strength and disdainful of common opinion. He had marvelled at their narrow vision and was unaware that his own point of view was equally narrow.