d it was just the
point. Repeatedly, however, it was a point that, in the face of strange
and special things, he judged it rather awkwardly gross to urge. It was
impossible to keep Mrs. Lowder out of their scheme. She stood there too
close to it and too solidly; it had to open a gate, at a given point,
do what they would to take her in. And she came in, always, while they
sat together rather helplessly watching her, as in a coach-in-four; she
drove round their prospect as the principal lady at the circus drives
round the ring, and she stopped the coach in the middle to alight with
majesty. It was our young man's sense that she was magnificently
vulgar, but yet, quite, that this wasn't all. It wasn't with her
vulgarity that she felt his want of means, though that might have
helped her richly to embroider it; nor was it with the same infirmity
that she was strong, original, dangerous.

His want of means--of means sufficient for anyone but himself--was
really the great ugliness, and was, moreover, at no time more ugly for
him than when it rose there, as it did seem to rise, shameless, face to
face with the elements in Kate's life colloquially and conveniently
classed by both of them as funny. He sometimes indeed, for that matter,
asked himself if these elements were as funny as the innermost fact, so
often vivid to him, of his own consciousness--his private inability to
believe he should ever be rich. His conviction on this head was in
truth quite positive and a thing by itself; he failed, after analysis,
to understand it, though he had naturally more lights on it than any
one else. He knew how it subsisted in spite of an equal consciousness
of his being neither mentally nor physically quite helpless, neither a
dunce nor a cripple; he knew it to be absolute, though secret, and
also, strange to say, about common undertakings, not discouraging, not
prohibitive. Only now was he having to think if it were prohibitive in
respect to marriage; only now, for the first time, had he to weigh his
case in scales. The scales, as he sat with Kate, often dangled in the
line of his vision; he saw them, large and black, while he talked or
listened, take, in the bright air, singular positions. Sometimes the
right was down and sometimes the left; never a happy equipoise--one or
the other always kicking the beam. Thus was kept before him the
question of whether it were more ignoble to ask a woman to take her
chance with you, or to accept it f