The people were all so interesting." Her pronunciation was as deliberately correct as if she were reading from a dictionary.

It was the air of superiority that she always assumed with Gershom, for in no other way, she had learned from experience, could she irritate him so intensely.
His jovial manner gave place to a crestfallen look.

"Who was there?
I reckon I know the names anyway." He affected a true republican scorn of appearances; and standing there, in his dishevelled business clothes beside Patty's ethereal youth, he looked as hopelessly battered by reality as a political theory, or as old General Powhatan Plummer of aristocratic descent.
Patty had often wondered what it was about the man that aroused in her so unconquerable an aversion.

He was not ugly compared to many of the men her father had brought to the house; and ten years ago, when she first met him in the little country town where they were living, his curling black hair and sharp black eyes had seemed to her rather attractive than otherwise.

If he had been merely untidy and unashamed in dress, she might have tolerated the failing as the outward sign of a distinguished social philosophy; but, even in those early days, his Jeffersonian simplicity had yielded to an outbreak of vanity.