There were no differences in the world--so it had all ended for him--but those that marked at every turn the manners he had for three months been observing in good society.
The general wide deviation of this body occupied his mind to the exclusion of almost everything else, and he had finally been brought to believe that even in his slow-paced prime he must have hung behind his contemporaries.

He had not supposed at the moment--in the fifties and the sixties--that he passed for old-fashioned, but life couldn't have left him so far in the rear had the start between them originally been fair.

This was the way he had more than once put the matter to the girl; which gives a sufficient hint, it is hoped, of the range of some of their talk.

It had always wound up indeed, their talk, with some assumption of the growth of his actual understanding; but it was just these pauses in the fray that seemed to lead from time to time to a sharper clash.

It was apt to be when he felt as if he had exhausted surprises that he really received his greatest shocks.