The three years had done much for him in a worldly way, wonderfully much.
As he looked at the woman who had shaken his life to the centre--not by her rejection of him, but by the fashion of it, the utter selfishness and cold-blooded calculation of it, he knew that love's fires were out, and that he could meet her without the agitation of a single nerve.

He despised her, but he could make allowance for her.

He knew the strain that was in her, got from her brilliant and rather plangent grandfather.

He knew the temptation of a vast fortune, the power that it would bring--and the notoriety, too, again an inheritance from her grandfather.

He was not without magnanimity, and he could the more easily exercise it because his pulses of emotion were still.
She was by nature the most brilliantly endowed woman he had ever met, the most naturally perceptive and artistic, albeit there was a touch of gorgeousness to the inherent artistry which time, training and experience would have chastened.