'I'm not surprised to hear that.' Thyrza had looked at Gilbert anxiously.
'Who told you that ?' she asked.
'He told me himself, Thyrza, last night.' She saw that Egremont was gazing at her; her eyes fell, and she became silent.
Egremont, in the course of the talk, wondered at his position in this little room.

He knew that it was one of very few houses in Lambeth in which he could have been at his ease; perhaps there was not another.

It seemed to him that he had thrown off a great deal that was artificial in behaviour and in habits of speech, that he had reverted to that self which came to him from his parents, and he felt better for the change.
The air of simplicity in the room and its occupants was healthful; of natural refinement there was abundance, only affectation was missing.
Would it have been a hardship if his father had failed to amass money, and he had grown up in such a home as this?
He knew well enough that by going, say, next door he could pass into a domestic sphere of a very different kind, to the midst of a life compact of mean slavery, of ignorance, of grossness.

This was enormously the exception.

But his own home would have been not unlike this.