marked in degree, inasmuch as he was very clever for one so young,
and very independent for one so poor.  He was eight-and-twenty, but
he had lived a good deal and was full of ambitions and curiosities
and disappointments.  The opportunity to talk of some of these in
Grosvenor Place corrected perceptibly the immense inconvenience of
London.  This inconvenience took for him principally the line of
insensibility to Allan Wayworth's literary form.  He had a literary
form, or he thought he had, and her intelligent recognition of the
circumstance was the sweetest consolation Mrs.  Alsager could have
administered.  She was even more literary and more artistic than he,
inasmuch as he could often work off his overflow (this was his
occupation, his profession), while the generous woman, abounding in
happy thoughts, but unedited and unpublished, stood there in the
rising tide like the nymph of a fountain in the plash of the marble
basin. 

The year before, in a big newspapery house, he had found himself next
her at dinner, and they had converted the intensely material hour
into a feast of reason.  There was no motive for her asking him to
come to see her but that she liked him, which it was the more