Was it a harmless paradox, intended to puzzle her?
or was it the last refinement of high culture?
She trusted she should learn in time; it would be very interesting to learn.

If it was provincial to have that harmony, what then was the finish of the capital?
And she could put this question in spite of so feeling her host a shy personage; since such shyness as his--the shyness of ticklish nerves and fine perceptions--was perfectly consistent with the best breeding.

Indeed it was almost a proof of standards and touchstones other than the vulgar: he must be so sure the vulgar would be first on the ground.

He wasn't a man of easy assurance, who chatted and gossiped with the fluency of a superficial nature; he was critical of himself as well as of others, and, exacting a good deal of others, to think them agreeable, probably took a rather ironical view of what he himself offered: a proof into the bargain that he was not grossly conceited.

If he had not been shy he wouldn't have effected that gradual, subtle, successful conversion of it to which she owed both what pleased her in him and what mystified her.