“I’m sure I should be very happy to help you with your French. I feel the advantage of knowing it,” Hyacinth remarked finely, becoming conscious that his declaration drew the attention of Lady Aurora toward him; so that he wondered what he could go on to say to keep at that level. This was the first time he had encountered socially a member of that aristocracy to which he had now for a good while known it was Miss Pynsent’s theory that he belonged; and the occasion was interesting in spite of the lady’s appearing to have so few of the qualities of her caste. She was about thirty years of age; her nose was large and, in spite of the sudden retreat of her chin, her face long and lean. She had the manner of extreme near-sightedness; her front teeth projected from her upper gums, which she revealed when she smiled, and her fair hair, in tangled silky skeins (Rose Muniment thought it too lovely), drooped over her pink cheeks. Her clothes looked as if she had worn them a good deal in the rain, and the note of a certain disrepair in her apparel was given by a hole in one of her black gloves, through which a white finger gleamed. She was plain and diffident and she might have been poor; but in the fine grain and sloping, shrinking slimness of her whole person, the delicacy of her curious features and a kind of cultivated quality in her sweet, vague, civil expression, there was a suggestion of race, of long transmission, of an organism that had resulted from fortunate touch after touch. She was not a common woman; she was one of the caprices of an aristocracy. Hyacinth didn’t define her in this manner to himself, but he received from her the impression that if she was a simple creature (which he learned later she was not) aristocracies were yet complicated things. Lady Aurora remarked that there were many delightful books in French, and he proclaimed it a torment to know that (as he did very well) when you saw no way to getting hold of them. This led Lady Aurora to say after a moment’s hesitation that she had a good lot of her own and that if he liked she should be most happy to lend them to him. Hyacinth thanked her—thanked her even too much, and felt both the kindness and the brilliant promise of the offer (he knew the exasperation of having volumes in his hands, for external treatment, which he couldn’t take home at night, having tried that method surreptitiously during his first weeks at old Crook’s and come very near being sacked in consequence) while he wondered how such a system could be put into practice; whether she would expect him to call at her house and wait in the hall till the books were sent out to him. Rose Muniment exclaimed that that was her ladyship all over—always wanting to make up to people for being less lucky than herself: she would take the shoes off her feet for any one that might take a fancy to them. At this the visitor declared that she would stop coming to see her if the girl caught her up that way for everything;