Never before had she encountered such vitality, such careless, pure, and uncalculating joy of life.

There was a tonic quality in his physical presence, and while she walked at his side down Fifth Avenue she felt as if she were swept onward by one of the health-giving, pine-scented winds of Colorado.

And she told herself reassuringly that only a man who had lived decently could have kept himself so extraordinarily young and exuberant at forty-five.
The shop windows, particularly those displaying men's shirtings, enchanted him; and he stopped a moment before each one, while she yielded as obligingly as she might have yielded to a fancy of Archibald's, though she was aware that her son would have scorned to look into a window.
"It's so seldom I get out on the Avenue, that's why I like it, I suppose," he remarked while they were surveying a festive arrangement of pink madras.
She smiled up at him, and her smile, gay as it was, held a touch of maternal solicitude.

Notwithstanding his bigness and his success and his forty-five years, there was something appealingly boyish about him.
"It would be so easy to get out, wouldn't it ?" she asked as they walked on again.
"Well, there ain't much fun when you are by yourself." "But you know plenty of people." "Oh, yes, I know people enough in a business way, but that don't mean having friends, does it?
Of course, I've men friends scattered everywhere," he added.

"The West is full of 'em, but it's funny when you come to think of it--" He broke off, hesitated an instant, and then went on again: "It's funny, but I don't believe.