"Give her this and tell her it never left my heart." The words thumped within him now.

How was Grizel to understand that he had meant nothing in particular by them?
I wonder if you misread him so utterly as to believe that he thought himself something of a prize?
That is a vulgar way of looking at things of which our fastidious Tommy was incapable.

As much as Grizel herself, he loathed the notion that women have a thirsty eye on man; when he saw them cheapening themselves before the sex that should hold them beyond price, he turned his head and would not let his mind dwell on the subject.

He was a sort of gentleman, was Tommy.

And he knew Grizel so well that had all the other women in the world been of this kind, it would not have persuaded him that there was a drop of such blood in her.