Life had been a picture with blurred outlines melting into a softly shaded whole.

Not for years had anything seemed to him quite a case for "Yes" or "No." It had been his creed, his delight, his business, too, to try and put himself in everybody's place, so that now there were but few places where he did not, speculatively speaking, feel at home.
Putting himself into the little model's place gave him but small delight.

Making due allowance for the sentiment men naturally import into their appreciation of the lives of women, his conception of her place was doubtless not so very wrong.
Here was a child, barely twenty years of age, country bred, neither a lady nor quite a working-girl, without a home or relatives, according to her own account--at all events, without those who were disposed to help her--without apparently any sort of friend; helpless by nature, and whose profession required a more than common wariness--this girl he was proposing to set quite adrift again by cutting through the single slender rope which tethered her.

It was like digging up a little rose-tree planted with one's own hands in some poor shelter, just when it had taken root, and setting it where the full winds would beat against it.

To do so brusque and, as it seemed to Hilary, so inhumane a thing was foreign to his nature.