's said and done, you know, she's colossally vulgar"--he had once
all but said that of Mrs. Lowder to her niece; only just keeping it
back at the last, keeping it to himself with all its danger about it.
It mattered because it bore so directly, and he at all events quite
felt it a thing that Kate herself would some day bring out to him. It
bore directly at present, and really all the more that somehow,
strangely, it didn't in the least imply that Aunt Maud was dull or
stale. She was vulgar with freshness, almost with beauty, since there
was beauty, to a degree, in the play of so big and bold a temperament.
She was in fine quite the largest possible quantity to deal with; and
he was in the cage of the lioness without his whip--the whip, in a
word, of a supply of proper retorts. He had no retort but that he loved
the girl--which in such a house as that was painfully cheap. Kate had
mentioned to him more than once that her aunt was Passionate, speaking
of it as a kind of offset and uttering it as with a capital P, marking
it as something that he might, that he in fact ought to, turn about in
some way to their advantage. He wondered at this hour to what advantage
he could turn it; but the case grew less simple the longer he waited.
Decidedly there was something he hadn't enough of. He stood as one fast.

His slow march to and fro seemed to give him the very measure; as he
paced and paced the distance it became the desert of his poverty; at
the sight of which expanse moreover he could pretend to himself as
little as before that the desert looked redeemable. Lancaster Gate
looked rich--that was all the effect; which it was unthinkable that any
state of his own should ever remotely resemble. He read more vividly,
more critically, as has been hinted, the appearances about him; and
they did nothing so much as make him wonder at his aesthetic reaction.
He hadn't known--and in spite of Kate's repeated reference to her own
rebellions of taste--that he should "mind" so much how an independent
lady might decorate her house. It was the language of the house itself
that spoke to him, writing out for him, with surpassing breadth and
freedom, the associations and conceptions, the ideals and possibilities
of the mistress. Never, he flattered himself, had he seen anything so
gregariously ugly--operatively, ominously so cruel. He was glad to have
found this last name for the whole character; "cruel" somehow played
into the subject for an art