There was machinery again, just as the plate glass, all about him, was money, was power, the power of the rich peoples.

Well, he was OF them now, of the rich peoples; he was on their side--if it wasn't rather the pleasanter way of putting it that they were on his.
Something of this sort was in any case the moral and the murmur of his walk.

It would have been ridiculous--such a moral from such a source--if it hadn't all somehow fitted to the gravity of the hour, that gravity the oppression of which I began by recording.

Another feature was the immediate nearness of the arrival of the contingent from home.

He was to meet them at Charing Cross on the morrow: his younger brother, who had married before him, but whose wife, of Hebrew race, with a portion that had gilded the pill, was not in a condition to travel; his sister and her husband, the most anglicised of Milanesi, his maternal uncle, the most shelved of diplomatists, and his Roman cousin, Don Ottavio, the most disponible of ex-deputies and of relatives--a scant handful of the consanguineous who, in spite of Maggie's plea for hymeneal reserve, were to accompany him to the altar.