When her companion demeaned himself in this manner it was not with a view of strengthening the tie that united him to his childhood’s friend; but the effect followed on Millicent’s side and the girl was proud to think herself in possession of a young man whose knowledge was of so high an order that it was inexpressible. In spite of her vanity she was not so convinced of her perfection as not to be full of ungratified aspirations; she had an idea it might be to her advantage some day to exhibit a sample of that learning; and at the same time, when, in consideration for instance of a jeweller’s gas-lighted display in Great Portland Street, Hyacinth lingered for five minutes in perfect silence and she delivered herself according to her wont at such junctures, she was a thousand miles from guessing the perverse sentiments that made it impossible for him to speak. She could long for things she was not likely to have; envy other people for possessing them and say it was a “regular shime”; draw brilliant pictures of what she should do with them if she did have them; and pass immediately, with a mind unencumbered by superfluous inductions, to some other topic equally intimate and personal. The sense of privation with her was often extremely acute; but she could always put her finger on the remedy. With her fellow-sufferer the case was very different; the remedy for him was terribly vague and inaccessible. He was liable to moods in which the sense of exclusion from all he would have liked most to enjoy in life settled on him like a pall. They had a bitterness, but they were not invidious—they were not moods of vengeance, of imaginary spoliation: they were simply states of paralysing melancholy, of infinite sad reflexion, in which he felt how in this world of effort and suffering life was endurable, the spirit able to expand, only in the best conditions, and how a sordid struggle in which one should go down to the grave without having tasted them was not worth the misery it would cost, the dull demoralisation it would involve.