But----" He saw that if he persisted, nothing soon would be left of that noble pile, the Grand Babylon Hotel, save a heap of ruins.

And, further, she genuinely did cause him to feel that throughout his career he had always missed the very best things of life, through being an uncherished, ingenuous, easily satisfied man.

A new sensation for him! For if any male in Europe believed in his own capacity to make others make him comfortable Priam Farll was that male.
"I've never been in Putney," he ventured, on a new track.
_Difficulty of Truth-telling_ As she informed him, with an ungrudging particularity, about Putney, and her life at Putney, there gradually arose in his brain a vision of a kind of existence such as he had never encountered.

Putney had clearly the advantages of a residential town in a magnificent situation.

It lay on the slope of a hill whose foot was washed by a glorious stream entitled the Thames, its breast covered with picturesque barges and ornamental rowing boats; an arched bridge spanned this stream, and you went over the bridge in milk-white omnibuses to London.