His youth had scarcely melted into manhood

She looked at him now and then on the sly, and felt, for the first time in her life, an interest in a man on his own account. He was so big, so handsome, so forceful.

She could not admit but that he had remarkable qualities, sometimes she thought that there was even in him a strange and unattractive greatness; it was curious then that she could not love him, but loved still a man whose worthlessness was now so clear to her.

She became aware that she had thought the less of him because he had thought the more of her. She had worshipped this other man because he had assumed superiority and had told her that he was big enough to be her master. But now, — now that it was all too late, — the veil had fallen from her eyes. She could now see the difference between manliness and 'deportment.

He was growing up. Soon he would be a man. He wondered what that would mean. Surely he could not have more required of him as an adult that had been required of him as a child. There could not be more.

When I was a boy, I thought myself a man. Now that I am a man, I find myself a boy.

A manly form at her side she saw, And joy was duty and love was law. Then she took up her burden of life again, Saying only, "It might have been".

Nothing moves a woman so deeply as the boyhood of the man she loves.

She knew this man's smile, his gentle ways of love, but not his godlike fury in the storm. She might snare him in a fragile net of music, love and flowers, but, at each departure, he would break forth without, it seemed to her, the least regret.

She’d been a different girl then. He’d been a different man. She missed both of them.

I often wonder what kind of a man he would have become. But I think I got a glimpse of that.

In her businesslike way she thought that her life had begun when she was a very young woman and she really did look lovely: you knew it wouldn't last and you packed all you could into it — but men were different. A man like B — like Alfie, too — never got beyond the time when they were boys and, damn them, it kept them young.

She open her eyes, give me a sad smile. “I wish I am a man, but I am not, so I do the next thing I can do. I marry a man

Watching him with one eye, she wondered if men ever figured out that they were more appealing when they were pursuing their own work than when they were pursuing a woman.