To listen to him was to combine the excitement of going out with the economy of staying at home.
There was only one hindrance--that I seemed not to know any of the people this brilliant couple had known.

I think he wondered extremely, during the term of our intercourse, whom the deuce I DID know.

He hadn't a stray sixpence of an idea to fumble for, so we didn't spin it very fine; we confined ourselves to questions of leather and even of liquor-saddlers and breeches-makers and how to get excellent claret cheap--and matters like "good trains" and the habits of small game.

His lore on these last subjects was astonishing--he managed to interweave the station-master with the ornithologist.

When he couldn't talk about greater things he could talk cheerfully about smaller, and since I couldn't accompany him into reminiscences of the fashionable world he could lower the conversation without a visible effort to my level.
So earnest a desire to please was touching in a man who could so easily have knocked one down.