He got a taste of that freedom which he had handed over to the dungeons of convention two years before.

He breathed.

Everything interested him so much that the life he had led in England seemed very distant.
He wrote to Delia, of course.

His letters were brief, most interesting, not tenderly intimate, and not daily.

From the first they puzzled her a little, and continued to do so; but because her mother said, "What an impossible man!" she said, "Perfectly possible! Of course he is not like other men; he is a genius." And the days went on.
Gaston little loved the purlieus of the Place de l'Opera.