Lee, known through life as Roony, was a Virginian of the eighteenth century... Tall, largely built, handsome, genial, with liberal Virginian openness towards all he liked, he had also the Virginian habit of command and took leadership as his natural habit. No one cared to contest it. None of the New Englanders wanted command. For a year, at least, Lee was the most popular and prominent young man in his class, but then seemed slowly to drop into the background... No one knew enough to know how ignorant he was; how childlike; how helpless before the relative complexity of a school. As an animal, the Southerner seemed to have every advantage, but even as an animal he steadily lost ground. Strictly, the Southerner had no mind; he had temperament. He was not a scholar; he had no intellectual training; he could not analyze an idea, and he could not even conceive of admitting two; but in life one could get along very well without ideas, if one had only the social instinct.

Her eyes were gray-irised, and of that mould that seems to have belonged to the orbs of all the famous queens of hearts.

Instant gratification is the curse of the X generation.

I had thought that the term was a nonce, but it seems as if it's been picked up by other authors.