Very hard! Is it? Then
why in the name of God, will you not go up to them and enter? You do not
like the conditions? But the conditions are the only natural
possibilities of entrance. Enter as you are and you would but see the
desert you think to leave behind you, not a glimpse of a promised land.
The false cannot inherit the true nor the unclean the lovely.
And it began to grow plain to him that now his aunt could no longer look
upon the idea of such an alliance, as she must _naturally_ have
regarded it before. It was a very different thing to see her in the
midst of such grounds and in such a house, with all the old-fashioned
comforts and luxuries of an ancient and prosperous family around her,
and in that of a toiling _litterateur_ in the dingy region of
Bloomsbury, where everything was--of course respectable in a way, but
that way a very inferior and--well, snuffy kind of way--where indeed you
could not dissociate the idea of smoke and brokers' shops from the
newest bonnet on Hester's queenly head! If he could get his aunt to see
her in the midst of these surroundings, then her beauty would have a
chance of working its natural effect upon her, tuned here to "its right
praise and true perfection.
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