He might have been signifying by it the sharp corners and hard edges, all the stony pointedness, the grand right geometry of his spreading Palladian church.

Just so, he was insensible to no feature of the felicity of a contact that, beguilingly, almost confoundingly, was a contact but with practically yielding lines and curved surfaces.
"You're round, my boy," he had said--"you're ALL, you're variously and inexhaustibly round, when you might, by all the chances, have been abominably square.

I'm not sure, for that matter," he had added, "that you're not square in the general mass--whether abominably or not.

The abomination isn't a question, for you're inveterately round--that's what I mean--in the detail.

It's the sort of thing, in you, that one feels--or at least I do--with one's hand.