When, however, Tinker was nine, she resigned with many misgivings, tears, and upbraidings of conscience, her charge of him, to marry a middle-aged Parisian hairdresser of Scotch nationality and the name of Angus McNeill.

Sir Tancred had far more trouble with the women who fell in love with him; and many women fell in love with him or thought themselves in love with him, for his handsome, melancholy face, his reputation for recklessness, and above all for his cold insensibility to their charm.
In ten years of the strenuous, smart life, his name was never coupled with that of any woman.

All and each of these made a pet of Tinker, since they found it the surest way to abate his father's coldness.

On the other hand the great ladies of the Faubourg de St.Germain petted him because his seraph's face and delightful manners charmed them; while any nice woman petted him because she could not help it.
Fortunately Tinker did not like being petted; his sentiments, indeed, on the matter of being kissed by the effusive verged on the ungallant.
He liked to be a nice woman's familiar friend; his attitude toward her could be almost avuncular; but if a woman would pet him, he endured it with the exquisite patience with which his father forever taught him to treat the sex.

In weaker hands than those of his father, he would doubtless have become a precocious and irritating monkey, always and painfully in evidence.