Why, he had scarcely been out of Bloomsbury!--the rest of London might not have existed for him.

A gallery-seat at the Lyceum Theatre, then in its early fame, and hot discussions of Irving and Ellen Terry with such artistic or literary acquaintance as he had made through the life-school or elsewhere--these had been his only distractions.

He stood amazed before his own virtues.

He drank little--smoked little.
As for women--he thought with laughter or wrath of Phoebe's touch of jealousy! There was an extremely pretty girl--a fair-haired, conscious minx--drawing in the same room with him at the British Museum.
Evidently she would have been glad to capture him; and he had loftily denied her.

If he had ever been as susceptible as Phoebe thought him, he was susceptible no more.