They no longer talked of the old subjects, but of those mean concerns of material life which formerly they had agreed to dismiss as quickly as possible.

Their relations to each other--not long ago an inexhaustible topic--would not bear spoken comment; both were too conscious of the danger-signal when they looked that way.
In the time of waiting for the publishers' offer, and now again when he was asking himself how he should use the respite granted him, Reardon spent his days at the British Museum.

He could not read to much purpose, but it was better to sit here among strangers than seem to be idling under Amy's glance.

Sick of imaginative writing, he turned to the studies which had always been most congenial, and tried to shape out a paper or two like those he had formerly disposed of to editors.

Among his unused material lay a mass of notes he had made in a reading of Diogenes Laertius, and it seemed to him now that he might make something salable out of these anecdotes of the philosophers.