No one could sing like that and be trivial at heart.

"I don't understand her," he muttered, gloomily, "but I appreciate one thing.
She has withheld from me her confidence, she does not wish to keep her old place in my affection, and has deposed herself from it.
She appears to be under the influence of a brood of sentimental aspirations.

I shall remain my old self, nor shall I gratify her by admiring wonder.

The one thing that would make life a burden to me is an intense, aesthetical, rapturously devotional woman, with her mental eye fixed on a vague ideal.

In such society I should feel much like a man compelled to walk on stilts all the time.