Your bookish man at the West has never learned to mark the distinction between the world of ideas and the world of practical life.

Instead of writing poems or romances, he falls to living them, or at least trying to.

Add a disappointment in love, and you will surely throw him into the class of which Anderson was the representative.

For the education one gets from books is sadly one-sided, unless it be balanced by a knowledge of the world.
Andrew Anderson had always been regarded as an oddity.

A man with a good share of ideality and literary taste, placed against the dull background of the society of a Western neighborhood in the former half of the century, would necessarily appear odd.