She was crude, she was common, she even had the vice of pointless exaggeration, for he himself honestly couldn’t understand how the situation he had described could make him nicer. But when the faculty of affection that was in her rose to the surface it diffused a glow of rest, almost of protection, deepening at any rate the luxury of their small cheap pastoral, the interlude in the grind of the week’s work; so that though neither of them had dined he would have been delighted to sit with her there the whole afternoon. It seemed a pause in something harsh that was happening to him, making it all easier, pushing it off to a distance. His thoughts hovered about that with a pertinacity of which they themselves wearied, but they hung there now with an ache of indifference. It would be too much, no doubt, to say that Millicent’s society appeared a compensation, yet he felt it at least a resource. For her too, evidently, the time had a taste; she made no proposal to retrace their steps. She questioned him about his father’s family and as to their letting him go on like that without ever holding out so much as a little finger; and she declared in a manner that was meant to gratify him by the indignation it conveyed, though the awkwardness of the turn made him smile, that if she had been one of such a bloated crew she should never have been able to “abear” the thought of a relation in such a poor way. Hyacinth already knew what Miss Henning thought of his business at old Crook’s and of the feeble show of a young man of his parts contented with a career that was after all a mere getting of one’s living by one’s ’ands. He had to do with books, but so had any shop-boy who should carry such articles to the residence of purchasers; and plainly Millicent had never discovered wherein the art he practised differed from that of a plumber or a saddler. He had not forgotten the shock once administered to her by his letting her know he wore an apron; she looked down on such conditions from her own so much higher range, since _she_ wore mantles and jackets and shawls and the long trains of robes exhibited behind plate glass on dummies of wire and drawn forth to be transferred to her own undulating person, and had moreover never a scrap to do with making them up, but just with talking about them and showing them off and persuading people—people too quite gaping with the impression—of their beauty and cheapness. It had been a source of endless comfort to her, in her arduous evolution, that she herself never worked with her ’ands. Hyacinth answered her inquiries, as she had answered his own of old, by asking her what “his family” owed to the son of a person who had brought murder and mourning into their bright sublimities, and whether she thought he was very highly recommended to them. His question pulled her up a moment; after which she returned with the finest spirit: “Well, if your position was so low ain’t that all the more reason they should give you a lift?