For this would have been precisely a violation of the ideal of the man of the world, the one ambition and even weakness that he had.

He wished to be a man of the world, and he never in the full sense was one.

He remained a little too much of a boy, a little too much even of a Puritan, and a little too much of what may be called a man of the universe, to be a man of the world.
One of his faults probably was the thing roughly called prejudice.

On the question, for example, of table-turning and psychic phenomena he was in a certain degree fierce and irrational.

He was not indeed, as we shall see when we come to study "Sludge the Medium," exactly prejudiced against spiritualism.