What a year that had been!--far the most wonderful of Harry’s life. So many new things had happened to him; he had been torn out of all his old habits, and made into another man with a new set of habits--as new as the light-coloured clothes in which alone it was possible to live on those southern coasts. And he had become so much the more of a man that he was now, so to speak, two men, one developed out of the other. He looked back upon the Henry Joscelyn of Liverpool with a mixture of amusement and pity. He had been a poor sort of limited creature, not knowing much; going half asleep between his office and his lodgings, now and then going to a poor theatre, walking about with small clerks in other offices, who knew nothing more than their own little gossip and the town news, and the fluctuations of trade. Perhaps it was a sign that Harry himself had not yet reached any great elevation, that he thought his present life so greatly superior. The reader knows he had not thought so always. He had compared his big, bare room, with its four white walls, most unfavourably with the carpeted and curtained parlour of his Liverpool experiences. But since that time his mind had undergone many transformations. His appartamento had become to him what Paolo’s was, a decent and tranquil shelter for the night. He had no longer thought of the respectabilities, of sitting there for a whole evening, of drinking tea, and having his friends to see him there. These were old customs at which he smiled. He had acquired a great many others which were now to him not only a second nature, but far more enjoyable, more lifelike, he thought, than the old. At all events, they were the habits of the present, not of the past. And amidst these changes, the advance in which might be questionable, were various other changes in Harry’s life of which the advantage was unquestionable. To live half his time in the Consul’s house, between a man of culture and education, and a young, fresh, intelligent girl, who had grown up knowing a world of things until then sealed books to Harry; and to have to do, not with mere bookkeeping, and sales, and goods of various descriptions, but with men, in a hundred little perplexities, out of which his skill, his patience, his superior knowledge, had to deliver them--were educating influences of the most active kind. He was a different man, and he felt himself to be so. How much he was the same man of course it was more difficult for Harry to see.