Then, though there were all kinds of girls in the class, merry, sentimental, practical, coquettish, prudes, there was no kind, he felt, whose heart he could not touch.

In love-making, as in the favourite Thrums game of the dambrod, there are sixty-one openings, and he knew them all.

Yet at the last dance, as at the first, the universal opinion of his partners (shop-girls, mostly, from the large millinery establishments, who had to fly like Cinderellas when the clock struck a certain hour) was that he kept himself to himself, and they were too much the lady to make up to a gentleman who so obviously did not want them.
Pym encouraged his friends to jeer at Tommy's want of interest in the sex, thinking it a way of goading him to action.

One evening, the bottles circulating, they mentioned one Dolly, goddess at some bar, as a fit instructress for him.

Coarse pleasantries passed, but for a time he writhed in silence, then burst upon them indignantly for their unmanly smirching of a woman's character, and swept out, leaving them a little ashamed.