He was so young; he was like a big schoolboy throwing stones into the living wells of literature and watching for the splash; it did her good to look at him.

So she looked, smiling her starved smile and snatching a fearful joy from his profane conversation.
There were moments when she asked herself how he came to be there at all; he was so out-of-place somehow.

The Moons and Quinceys denounced him as a stranger and intruder; the very chairs and tables had memories, associations that rejected him; everything in the room suggested the same mystic antagonism; it was as if Mrs.Moon and all her household gods were in league against him.

Oddly enough this attitude of theirs heightened her sense of intimacy with him, made him hers and no one else's for the time.

The pleasure she took in his society had some of the peculiar private ecstasy of sin.
And Mrs.Moon wondered what the young man was going to charge for that little visit; and what the total of his account would be.