He was truthful, he was generous, he was brave, kind, and tolerant; but his virtues, like his personality, were large, flamboyant, and without gradations of colour.

Custom had not pruned their natural luxuriance, nor had tradition toned down the violence of their contrasts.

They were experimental, not established virtues, as obviously the expression of the man himself as was his uncultivated preference for red geraniums.
For he possessed, she admitted, a sincerity such as she had not believed compatible with human designs--certainly not with human achievement.
According to the code of the sheltered half of her sex--according to the inflexible code of her mother and Jane--he was not a gentleman.

He lacked breeding, he lacked taste, he lacked the necessary education of schools; but in other ways, in ways peculiarly his own, she was beginning dimly to realize that he possessed qualities immeasurably larger than any superficial lack in his nature.

In balance, moderation, restraint--in all the gracious attributes with which Arthur was endowed in her memory, in all the attributes she had particularly esteemed in the past--she understood that O'Hara would undoubtedly fall below her inherited standards.