The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Pupil by Henry James: him as much as if they had really been a band of gipsies. He was
still young and had not seen much of the world - his English years
had been properly arid; therefore the reversed conventions of the
Moreens - for they had THEIR desperate proprieties - struck him as
topsy-turvy. He had encountered nothing like them at Oxford; still
less had any such note been struck to his younger American ear
during the four years at Yale in which he had richly supposed
himself to be reacting against a Puritan strain. The reaction of
the Moreens, at any rate, went ever so much further. He had
thought himself very sharp that first day in hitting them all off
in his mind with the "cosmopolite" label. Later it seemed feeble
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