Five years hence he would be almost twenty-four; what the girls he knew called "one of the older men." He could imagine himself at twenty-four, but beyond that, his powers staggered and refused the task.

He saw little essential difference between thirty-eight and eighty-eight, and his mother was to him not a woman but wholly a mother.

He had no perception of her other than as an adjunct to himself, his mother; nor could he imagine her thinking or doing anything--falling in love, walking with a friend, or reading a book--as a woman, and not as his mother.

The woman, Isabel, was a stranger to her son; as completely a stranger as if he had never in his life seen her or heard her voice.

And it was to-night, while he stood with her, "receiving," that he caught a disquieting glimpse of this stranger whom he thus fleetingly encountered for the first time.
Youth cannot imagine romance apart from youth.