They had grown practically tolerant of each other's disagreeable traits; and the danger that really threatened them was that they should grow too well satisfied with themselves, if not with each other.

They were not sentimental, they were rather matter-of-fact in their motives; but they had both a sort of humorous fondness for sentimentality.

They liked to play with the romantic, from the safe vantage-ground of their real practicality, and to divine the poetry of the commonplace.

Their peculiar point of view separated them from most other people, with whom their means of self-comparison were not so good since their marriage as before.

Then they had travelled and seen much of the world, and they had formed tastes which they had not always been able to indulge, but of which they felt that the possession reflected distinction on them.