Americans, rightly or wrongly, are commended for the ease with which they adapt themselves to foreign conditions; but Mr.
Touchett had made of the very limits of his pliancy half the ground of his general success.

He had retained in their freshness most of his marks of primary pressure; his tone, as his son always noted with pleasure, was that of the more luxuriant parts of New England.

At the end of his life he had become, on his own ground, as mellow as he was rich; he combined consummate shrewdness with the disposition superficially to fraternise, and his "social position," on which he had never wasted a care, had the firm perfection of an unthumbed fruit.

It was perhaps his want of imagination and of what is called the historic consciousness; but to many of the impressions usually made by English life upon the cultivated stranger his sense was completely closed.

There were certain differences he had never perceived, certain habits he had never formed, certain obscurities he had never sounded.