He, sitting so close to her and breathing in through his skin the emanations of her young magnetism, was moved to the depths by the picture her words conjured.

This beautiful girl, a mere child, born and bred in the lady class, wandering away penniless and alone, to be a prey to the world's buffetings which, severe enough in reality, seem savage beyond endurance to the children of wealth.
As he pictured it his heart impulsively expanded.

It was at his lips to offer to marry her.

But his real self--and one's real self is vastly different from one's impulses--his real self forbade the words passage.

Not even the sex impulse, intoxicating him as it then was, could dethrone snobbish calculation.