She tried to read something in his face, in that energetic kindly face to which she had become accustomed so soon.

But she was not yet capable of understanding its expression.

Scared, discouraged on the threshold of adolescence, plunged in moral misery of the bitterest kind, she had not learned to read--not that sort of language.
If Anthony's love had been as egoistic as love generally is, it would have been greater than the egoism of his vanity--or of his generosity, if you like--and all this could not have happened.

He would not have hit upon that renunciation at which one does not know whether to grin or shudder.

It is true too that then his love would not have fastened itself upon the unhappy daughter of de Barral.