T. de Saint-Germain. There were certain members of an intensely modern school, advanced and scientific realists, of whom Hyacinth had heard and on whom he had long desired to put his hand; but, evidently, none of them had ever stumbled into Lady Aurora’s candid collection, though she did possess a couple of Balzac’s novels, which, by ill-luck, happened to be just those that Hyacinth had read more than once. There was, nevertheless, something very agreeable to him in the moments he passed in the big, dim, cool, empty house, where, at intervals, monumental pieces of furniture—not crowded and miscellaneous, as he had seen the appurtenances of the Princess—loomed and gleamed, and Lady Aurora’s fantastic intonations awakened echoes which gave him a sense of privilege, of rioting, decently, in the absence of jealous influences. She talked again about the poor people in the south of London, and about the Muniments in particular; evidently, the only fault she had to find with these latter was that they were not poor enough—not sufficiently exposed to dangers and privations against which she could step in. Hyacinth liked her for this, even though he wished she would talk of something else—he hardly knew what, unless it was that, like Rose Muniment, he wanted to hear more about Inglefield. He didn’t mind, with the poor, going into questions of poverty—it even gave him at times a strange, savage satisfaction—but he saw that in discussing them with the rich the interest must inevitably be less; they could never treat them _à fond_. Their mistakes and illusions, their thinking they had got hold of the sensations of the destitute when they hadn’t at all, would always be more or less irritating. It came over Hyacinth that if he found this want of perspective in Lady Aurora’s deep conscientiousness, it would be a queer enough business when he should come to go into the detail of such matters with the Princess Casamassima.