The young man, in other words, unconfusedly smiled--though indeed as if assenting, from principle and habit, to more than he understood.

He liked all signs that things were well, but he cared rather less WHY they were.
In regard to the people among whom he had since his marriage been living, the reasons they so frequently gave--so much oftener than he had ever heard reasons given before--remained on the whole the element by which he most differed from them; and his father-in-law and his wife were, after all, only first among the people among whom he had been living.

He was never even yet sure of how, at this, that or the other point, he would strike them; they felt remarkably, so often, things he hadn't meant, and missed not less remarkably, and not less often, things he had.

He had fallen back on his general explanation--"We haven't the same values;" by which he understood the same measure of importance.

His "curves" apparently were important because they had been unexpected, or, still more, unconceived; whereas when one had always, as in his relegated old world, taken curves, and in much greater quantities too, for granted, one was no more surprised at the resulting feasibility of intercourse than one was surprised at being upstairs in a house that had a staircase.