Yet when Falbe hailed the Rhine and the spires of Cologne, it was clear that there was no bad form about it at all.

He felt like that; and, indeed, as Michael was beginning to perceive, he felt with a similar intensity on all subjects about which he felt at all.

There was something of the same vivid quality about Aunt Barbara, but Aunt Barbara's vividness was chiefly devoted to the hunt of the absurdities of her friends, and it was always the concretely ridiculous that she pursued.

But this handsome, vital young man, with his eagerness and his welcome for the world, who had fallen with so delightful a cordiality into Michael's company, had already an attraction for him of a sort he had never felt before.
Dimly, as the days went by, he began to conjecture that he who had never had a friend was being hailed and halloed to, was being ordered, if not by precept, at any rate by example, to come out of the shell of his reserve, and let himself feel and let himself express.

He could see how utterly different was Falbe's general conception and practice of life from his own; to Michael it had always been a congregation of strangers--Francis excepted--who moved about, busy with each other and with affairs that had no allure for him, and were, though not uncivil, wholly alien to him.