He was aware at the same time that his grind had been as nothing to Waymarsh's, and he repeatedly confessed that, to cover his frivolity, he was doing his best for his previous virtue.

Do what he might, in any case, his previous virtue was still there, and it seemed fairly to stare at him out of the windows of shops that were not as the shops of Woollett, fairly to make him want things that he shouldn't know what to do with.

It was by the oddest, the least admissible of laws demoralising him now; and the way it boldly took was to make him want more wants.

These first walks in Europe were in fact a kind of finely lurid intimation of what one might find at the end of that process.

Had he come back after long years, in something already so like the evening of life, only to be exposed to it?
It was at all events over the shop-windows that he made, with Waymarsh, most free; though it would have been easier had not the latter most sensibly yielded to the appeal of the merely useful trades.