Though his clothes were unbrushed and his boots were unpolished, he wore a sparkling pin in his tie and several sparkling rings on his fingers.
There was something else, too, some easy tone of patronage, some familiar inflexion, which as a child she had hated.

Now, after the evening with Stephen Culpeper, she shrank from him with a disgust which was made all the keener by contrast.

A pitiless light had fallen over Gershom while he stood there beside her, as if his bad taste and his pathetic ambition to appear something that he was not, had become exaggerated into positive vices.

She was too young to perceive the essential pathos of all wasted effort, of all misdirected attempts to overcome the disadvantages of ignorance; and while she looked at him now, she saw only the vulgarity.

Like all those who have suffered from insufficient opportunities and wounded pride, Patty Vetch was without mercy for the very weaknesses that she had risen above.