She desired at last to raise their common experience to a loftier level, to enjoy what she called a high-class treat. Their commerce had been condemned for the most part to go forward in the streets, the wintry, dusky, foggy streets, which looked bigger and more numerous in their perpetual obscurity and in which everything was covered with damp, gritty smut, an odour extremely agreeable to Miss Henning. Happily she shared Hyacinth’s relish of vague perambulation and was still more addicted than he to looking into the windows of shops, before which, in long, contemplative halts, she picked out freely the articles she shouldn’t mind having put up for her. He invariably pronounced the objects of her selection hideous and made no scruple to assure her she had the worst taste of any girl in the place. Nothing he could say to her affronted her so much, for her pretensions in the way of a cultivated judgement were boundless. Had not indeed her natural aptitude been fortified, in the neighbourhood of Buckingham Palace (there was scarcely anything they didn’t sell in the great shop of which she was an ornament), by daily contact with the freshest products of modern industry? Hyacinth laughed this establishment to scorn and made the point that there was nothing in it from top to bottom that a real artist would look at. She inquired with answering derision if this were a description of his own few inches; but in reality she was fascinated as much as she was provoked by his attitude of being difficult to please, of seeing indescribable differences among the smartest things. She had given herself out originally as very knowing, but he could make her gape with doubts. When once in a while he pointed out a commodity that he condescended to like (this didn’t happen often, because the only shops in which there was a chance of his making such a discovery were closed at nightfall) she stared and bruised him with her elbow, declaring that if any one should give her such a piece of rubbish she would sell it for fourpence. Once or twice she asked him to be so good as to explain to her in what its superiority consisted—she couldn’t rid herself of a suspicion that there might be something in his judgement and was angry at not finding herself as positive as any one. Then he would reply that it was no use attempting to tell her; she wouldn’t understand and had better continue to admire the insipid productions of an age that had lost the sense of fineness—a phrase she remembered, proposing to herself even to make use of it on some future occasion, but was quite unable to interpret.