Had you talked to him for a week, you could not have made him understand the scorn and loathing with which the Colonel regarded him.

Here was a young fellow as keen as the oldest curmudgeon; a lad with scarce a beard to his chin, that would pursue his bond as rigidly as Shylock.

"If he is like this at twenty, what will he be at fifty ?" groaned the Colonel.
"I'd rather Clive were dead than have him such a heartless woriding as this." And yet the young man was not ungenerous, not untruth-telling, not unserviceable.

He thought his life was good enough.

It was as good as that of other folks he lived with.