He could sustain a conversation between Mrs.Hunt and Rachel, and carry on a tea-party including the Rev.William Johnson and Miss Macquoid, the Christian Scientists, with remarkable likeness to the truth.

But he had known many more people, and was far more highly skilled in the art of narrative than Rachel was, whose experiences were, for the most part, of a curiously childlike and humorous kind, so that it generally fell to her lot to listen and ask questions.
He told her not only what had happened, but what he had thought and felt, and sketched for her portraits which fascinated her of what other men and women might be supposed to be thinking and feeling, so that she became very anxious to go back to England, which was full of people, where she could merely stand in the streets and look at them.

According to him, too, there was an order, a pattern which made life reasonable, or if that word was foolish, made it of deep interest anyhow, for sometimes it seemed possible to understand why things happened as they did.

Nor were people so solitary and uncommunicative as she believed.
She should look for vanity--for vanity was a common quality--first in herself, and then in Helen, in Ridley, in St.John, they all had their share of it--and she would find it in ten people out of every twelve she met; and once linked together by one such tie she would find them not separate and formidable, but practically indistinguishable, and she would come to love them when she found that they were like herself.
If she denied this, she must defend her belief that human beings were as various as the beasts at the Zoo, which had stripes and manes, and horns and humps; and so, wrestling over the entire list of their acquaintances, and diverging into anecdote and theory and speculation, they came to know each other.

The hours passed quickly, and seemed to them full to leaking-point.