"I like luxuries so desperately, and when I get them I seem to myself now the vulgarest creature alive, who has no right to an opinion or an enthusiasm, or anything else worth having.

You must not let me like them--you must help me not to care about them!" Raeburn's eye as he looked at her was tenderness itself.

He could of course neither mock her, nor put what she said aside.

This question she had raised, this most thorny of all the personal questions of the present--the ethical relation of the individual to the World's Fair and its vanities--was, as it happened, a question far more sternly and robustly real to him than it was to her.

Every word in his few sentences, as they stood talking by the fire, bore on it for a practised ear the signs of a long wrestle of the heart.
But to Marcella it sounded tame; her ear was haunted by the fragments of another tune which she seemed to be perpetually trying to recall and piece together.