n their poorness; but Mrs.
Condrip's interior, even by this best view of it and though not
flagrantly mean, showed itself as a setting almost grotesquely inapt.
Pale, grave and charming, she affected him at once as a distinguished
stranger--a stranger to the little Chelsea street--who was making the
best of a queer episode and a place of exile. The extraordinary thing
was that at the end of three minutes he felt himself less appointedly a
stranger in it than she.

A part of the queerness--this was to come to him in glimpses--sprang
from the air as of a general large misfit imposed on the narrow room by
the scale and mass of its furniture. The objects, the ornaments were,
for the sisters, clearly relics and survivals of what would, in the
case of Mrs. Condrip at least, have been called better days. The
curtains that overdraped the windows, the sofas and tables that stayed
circulation, the chimney-ornaments that reached to the ceiling and the
florid chandelier that almost dropped to the floor, were so many
mementoes of earlier homes and so many links with their unhappy mother.
Whatever might have been in itself the quality of these elements
Densher could feel the effect proceeding from them, as they lumpishly
blocked out the decline of the dim day, to be ugly almost to the point
of the sinister. They failed to accommodate or to compromise; they
asserted their differences without tact and without taste. It was truly
having a sense of Kate's own quality thus promptly to see them in
reference to it. But that Densher had this sense was no new thing to
him, nor did he in strictness need, for the hour, to be reminded of it.
He only knew, by one of the tricks his imagination so constantly played
him, that he was, so far as her present tension went, very specially
sorry for her--which was not the view that had determined his start in
the morning; yet also that he himself would have taken it all, as he
might say, less hard. _He_ could have lived in such a place; but it
wasn't given to those of his complexion, so to speak, to be exiled
anywhere. It was by their comparative grossness that they could somehow
make shift. His natural, his inevitable, his ultimate home--left, that
is, to itself--wasn't at all unlikely to be as queer and impossible as
what was just round them, though doubtless in less ample masses. As he
took in moreover how Kate wouldn't have been in the least the creature
she was if what was just round them hadn't mism