He was too well-bred ever to be blatant in his unbelief--he would as soon have thought of attacking a man's family to his face as of attacking his creed; but subtly and with infinite tact he endeavoured to prove that to adapt ancient revelations to modern requirements was merely putting new wine into old bottles and mending old garments with new cloth; and Elisabeth was as yet too young and inexperienced to see any fallacy in his carefully prepared arguments.
She had nobody to help her to resist him, poor child! and she was dazzled with the consciousness of intellectual power which his attitude of mind appeared to take for granted.

Miss Farringdon was cast in too stern a mould to have any sympathy or patience with the blind gropings of an undisciplined young soul; and Christopher--who generally understood and sympathized with all Elisabeth's difficulties and phases--was so jealous of her obvious attachment to Tremaine, and so unhappy on account of it, that for the time being the faithful friend was entirely swallowed up in the irate lover, sighing like one of the Osierfield furnaces.

Of course this was very unfair and tiresome of him--nobody could deny that; but it is sometimes trying to the amiability of even the best of men to realize that the purely mundane and undeserved accident of want of money can shut them off entirely from ever attaining to the best kind of happiness whereof their natures are capable--and especially when they know that their natures are capable of attaining and appreciating a very high standard of happiness indeed.

It may not be right to be unsociable because one is unhappy, but it is very human and most particularly masculine; and Christopher just then was both miserable and a man.
There was much about Alan that was very attractive to Elisabeth: he possessed a certain subtlety of thought and an almost feminine quickness of perception which appealed powerfully to her imagination.

Imagination was Elisabeth's weak, as well as her strong, point.