The Dilettante — Edith Wharton

The "as usual" was his own qualification of the act; a convenient way of bridging the interval-in days and other sequences-that lay between this visit and the last. It was characteristic of him that he instinctively excluded his call two days earlier, with Ruth Gaynor, from the list of his visits to Mrs. Vervain: the special conditions attending it had made it no more like a visit to Mrs. Vervain than an engraved dinner invitation is like a personal letter.