There came a sense of dishonesty, too, in having used the old man's money chiefly in acquiring those mental graces which his father could neither comprehend nor value.
Three years passed.

Gradually the memory of his love for the sea-maid had grown indistinct; and, more or less unconscious that this love had been the door to the more wealthy gardens of his mind, he inclined to despise it now as he despised the elegy he had written for the child who was drowned.

It was his own passion he was inclined to forget and despise; the sea-maid herself was remembered, and respected, and wondered at, and disbelieved in, and believed in, as of old, but that which remains in the mind, never spoken of, never used as a cause of activity of either thought or action, recedes into the latent rather than the active portion of the memory.
Once, just once, in the first year of his foreign life, he had told to a friend the history of that, his one and only love-story.

The result had not been satisfactory.

His companion was quite sure that Caius had been the subject of an artful trick, and he did not fail to suggest that the woman had wanted modesty.