An elusive, vague, distant kind of disturbance--he could not say trouble--had stolen into her eyes, had taken possession of the corners of the mouth; and he was conscious of something exotic, self-indulgent, and "emancipated." She had always been self-indulgent and selfish, and, in a wilful, innocent way, emancipated, in the old days; but here was a different, a fuller, a more daring expression of these qualities....

Ah, he had it now! That elusive something was a lurking recklessness, which, perhaps, was not bold enough yet to leap into full exercise, or even to recognize itself.
So this was she to whom he had given the best of which he had been capable--not a very noble or priceless best, he was willing to acknowledge, but a kind of guarantee of the future, the nucleus of fuller things.

As he looked at her now his heart did not beat faster, his pulses did not quicken, his eye did not soften, he did not even wish himself away.

Love was as dead as last year's leaves--so dead that no spirit of resentment, or humiliation, or pain of heart was in his breast at this sight of her again.

On the contrary, he was conscious of a perfect mastery of himself, of being easily superior to the situation.
Love was dead; youth was dead; the desire that beats in the veins of the young was dead; his disillusion and disappointment and contempt for one woman had not driven him, as it so often does, to other women--to that wild waste which leaves behind it a barren and ill-natured soil exhausted of its power, of its generous and native health.