'But it's certainly nice of you to think so,' he added.
There was something a little unusual in his inflection which led me to ask at this point whether he was an American, and to discover that he came from somewhere in Wisconsin, not directly, but by way of a few years in London and Paris.

This accounted in a way for the effect of freedom in any fortune about him for which I already liked him, and perhaps partly for the look of unembarrassed inquiry and experiment which sat so lightly in his unlined face.

He came, one realized, out of the fermentation of new conditions; he never could have been the product of our limits and systems and classes in England.

His surroundings, his 'things,' as he called them, were as old as the sense of beauty, but he seemed simply to have put them where he could see them, there was no pose in their arrangement.

They were all good, and his delight in them was plain; but he was evidently in no sense a connoisseur beyond that of natural instinct.