etiquette would permit.

His awakened mind gave but little thought to his entertainers, and he
did not anticipate much pleasure from their society. He was satisfied
that they were refined, cultivated people, with whom he could be as
much at ease as would be possible in any companionship, but he hoped
and proposed to spend the most of his time alone in wandering amid old
scenes and brooding over the past. The morbid mind is ever full of
unnatural contradictions, and he found a melancholy pleasure in
shutting his eyes to the future and recalling the time when he had
been happy and hopeful. In his egotism he found more that interested
him in his past and vanished self than in the surrounding world. Evil
and ill-health had so enfeebled his body, narrowed his mind, and
blurred the future, that his best solace seemed a vain and sentimental
recalling of the crude yet comparatively happy period of childhood.

This is sorry progress. A man must indeed have lived radically wrong
when he looks backward for the best of his life. Gray-haired Mr.
Walton was looking forward. Gregory's habit of self-pleasing--of
acting according to his mood--was too deeply seated to permit even the
thought of returning the hospitality he hoped to enjoy by a cordial
effort on his part to prove himself an agreeable guest. Polite he ever
would be, for he had the instincts and training of a gentleman, in
society's interpretation of the word, but he had lost the power to
feel a generous solicitude for the feelings and happiness of others.
Indeed, he rather took a cynical pleasure in discovering defects in
the character of those around him, and in learning that their seeming
enjoyment of life was but hollow and partial. Conscious of being evil
himself, he liked to think others were not much better, or would not
be if tempted. Therefore, with a gloomy scepticism, he questioned all