After the evening at the Berkeleys' she felt that she should be less ashamed of a drunkard than of a man who wore diamonds because he thought that it was the correct thing to do.

She remembered suddenly that on her fourteenth birthday she had bought a pair of paste earrings with ten dollars her father had given her; and for the sting of this reminder she knew that she should never forgive Gershom.

Oh, she had no patience with a man who couldn't find out things and learn without asking questions! Hadn't she tried and tried, and made mistakes and tried again, and still gone on trying by hook or by crook; as her father would say, to find out the thousand and one things she oughtn't to do?
If she, even as a child, had struggled so hard to improve herself and change in the right way, not the wrong way--then why shouldn't he?
Her father, of course, wasn't polished, but he was as unlike Gershom as if they had been born as far apart as the poles.

Even to her untrained eyes it was evident that Vetch possessed the authority of personality--a sanction that was not social but moral.

Some inherent dislike for anything that was not solid, that was not genuine, had served Vetch as a kind of aesthetic discrimination.
"I know Benham," Gershom was saying eagerly.