“I’m sure a princess might look at you and be none the worse!” she declared in her delight at this assurance, more positive than any she had yet received, that he was safe from the worse danger. This the dressmaker considered to be the chance of his marrying some person of her own base order. Still it came over her that his taste might be lowered, and before the subject was dropped, on the present occasion, she said that of course he must be quite aware of all that was wanting to such a girl as Millicent ’Enning—who visibly wasn’t worth any struggle for her aspirate. “Oh, I don’t bother about what’s wanting to her. I’m content with what she has.” “Content, dearest—how do you mean?” the little dressmaker quavered. “Content to make an intimate friend of her?” “It’s impossible I should discuss these matters with you,” Hyacinth grandly enough replied. “Of course I see that. But I should think she’d bore you sometimes,” Miss Pynsent threw off cunningly. “She does, I assure you, to extinction!” “Then why do you spend every evening with her?” “Where should you like me to spend my evenings? At some beastly public-house—or at the Italian opera?” His association with Miss Henning was not so close as that, but nevertheless he wouldn’t take the trouble to prove to poor Pinnie that he enjoyed her society only two or three times a week; that on other evenings he simply strolled about the streets (this boyish habit clung to him) and that he had even occasionally the resource of going to the Poupins’ or of gossiping and smoking a pipe at some open house-door, when the night was not cold, with a fellow-mechanic. Later in the winter, after he had made Paul Muniment’s acquaintance, the aspect of his life changed considerably, though Millicent continued to be exceedingly mixed up with it. He hated the taste of liquor and still more the taste of the places where it was sold; besides which the types of misery and vice that one was liable to see collected in them frightened and harrowed him, made him ask himself questions that pierced the deeper because they were met by no answer. It was both a blessing and a drawback to him that the delicate, charming character of the work he did at old Crook’s, under Eustache Poupin’s influence, was a kind of education of the taste, trained him in the finest discriminations, in the recognition of the rare and the hatred of the cheap. This made the brutal, garish, stodgy decoration of public-houses, with their deluge of gaslight, their glittering brass and pewter, their lumpish woodwork and false colours, detestable to him. He had been still very young when the “gin-palace” ceased to convey to him an idea of the palatial.