BOOK SECOND

XII

Hyacinth and his companion took their seats with extreme promptitude before the curtain rose on The Pearl of Paraguay. Thanks to Millicent’s eagerness not to be late they encountered the discomfort which had constituted her main objection to going into the pit: they waited for twenty minutes at the door of the theatre, in a tight, stolid crowd, before the official hour of opening. Millicent, bareheaded and powerfully laced, presented a splendid appearance and, on Hyacinth’s part, gratified a youthful, ingenuous pride of possession in every respect save a tendency, while ingress was denied them, to make her neighbours feel her elbows and to comment loudly and sarcastically on the situation. It was more clear to him even than it had been before that she was a young lady who in public places might easily need a champion or an apologist. Hyacinth knew there was only one way to apologise for a “female” when the female was attached very closely and heavily to one’s arm, and was reminded afresh of how little constitutional aversion Miss Henning had to a row. He had an idea she might think his own taste ran even too little in that direction, and entertained visions of violent confused scenes in which he should in some way distinguish himself: he scarcely knew in what way and imagined himself more easily routing some hulking adversary by an exquisite application of the retort courteous than by flying at him with a pair of very small fists.

By the time they had reached their places in the balcony she was rather flushed and a good deal ruffled; but she had composed herself in season for the rising of the curtain on the farce preceding the melodrama and which the pair had had no intention of losing. At this stage a more genial agitation took possession of her and she surrendered her sympathies to the horse-play of the traditional prelude. Hyacinth found it less amusing, but the theatre, in any conditions, was full of sweet deception for him. His imagination projected itself lovingly across the footlights, gilded and coloured the shabby canvas and battered accessories, losing itself so effectually in the fictive world that the end of the piece, however long or however short, brought with it something of the alarm of a stoppage of his personal life. It was impossible to be more friendly to the dramatic illusion. Millicent, as the audience thickened, rejoiced more largely and loudly, held herself as a lady, surveyed the place as if she knew all about it, leaned back and leaned forward, fanned herself with majesty, gave her opinion upon the appearance and coiffure of every woman within sight, abounded in question and conjecture and produced from her pocket a little paper of peppermint-drops of which under cruel threats she compelled Hyacinth to partake. She followed with attention, though not always with success, the complicated adventures of the Pearl of Paraguay through scenes luxuriantly tropical, in which the male characters wore sombreros and stilettos and the ladies either danced the cachucha or fled from licentious pursuit; but her eyes wandered intermittently to the occupants of the boxes and stalls, concerning several of whom she had theories which she imparted to Hyacinth, while the play went on, greatly to his discomfiture, he being unable to conceive of such levity. She had the pretension of knowing who every one was; not individually and by name, but as regards their exact social station, the quarter of London in which they lived and the amount of money they were prepared to spend in the neighbourhood of Buckingham Palace. She had seen the whole town pass through her establishment there, and though Hyacinth, from his infancy, had been watching it at his own point of view, his companion made him feel all the characteristic points he had missed. Her interpretations differed from his largely in being so very bold and irreverent. Miss Henning’s observation of the London world had not been of a nature to impress her with its high moral tone, and she had a free off-hand cynicism which imposed itself. She thought most ladies hypocrites and had in all ways a low opinion of her own sex, which more than once before this she had justified to Hyacinth by narrating observations of a surprising kind gathered during her career as a shop-girl. There was a pleasing inconsequence therefore in her being moved to tears in the third act of the play, when the Pearl of Paraguay, dishevelled and distracted, dragging herself on her knees, implored the stern hidalgo her father to believe in her innocence in spite of circumstances appearing to condemn her—a midnight meeting with the wicked hero in the grove of cocoanuts. It was at this crisis none the less that she asked Hyacinth who his friends were in the principal box on the left of the stage and let him know that a gentleman seated there had been watching him at intervals for the past half-hour.

“Watching me! I like that! When I want to be watched I take you with me.”

“Of course he has looked at me,” Millicent answered as if she had no interest in denying that. “But you’re the one he wants to get hold of.”

“To get hold of!”

“Yes, you ninny: don’t hang back. He may make your fortune.”

“Well, if you’d like him to come and sit by you I’ll go and take a walk in the Strand,” said Hyacinth, entering into the humour of the occasion but not seeing from where he was placed any gentleman in the box. Millicent explained that the mysterious observer had just altered his position; he had gone to the back, which must have had considerable depth. There were other persons there, out of sight; she and Hyacinth were too much on the same side. One of them was a lady concealed by the curtain; her arm, bare save for its bracelets, was visible at moments on the cushioned ledge. Hyacinth saw it in effect reappear there, and even while the piece proceeded regarded it with a certain interest; but till the curtain fell at the end of the act there was no further symptom that a gentleman wished to get hold of him.

“Now do you say it’s me he’s after?” Millicent asked abruptly, giving him a sidelong dig while the fiddlers in the orchestra began to scrape their instruments for the interlude.

“Of course; I’m only the pretext,” Hyacinth replied, after he had looked a moment, in a manner which he flattered himself was a proof of quick self-possession. The gentleman designated by his friend was once more at the front and leaning forward with his arms on the edge. Hyacinth saw he was looking straight at him, and our young man returned his gaze—an effort not rendered the more easy by the fact that after an instant he recognised him.

“Well, if he knows us he might give some sign, and if he doesn’t he might leave us alone,” Millicent declared, abandoning the distinction she had made between herself and her companion. She had no sooner spoken than the gentleman complied with the first-mentioned of these conditions; he smiled at Hyacinth across the house—he nodded to him with unmistakable friendliness. Millicent, perceiving this, glanced at the young man from Lomax Place and saw that the demonstration had brought a deep colour to his cheek. He was blushing, flushing; whether with pleasure or embarrassment didn’t immediately appear. “I say, I say—is it one of your grand relations?” she promptly asked. “Well, I can stare as well as him”; and she told Hyacinth it was a “shime” to bring a young lady to the play when you hadn’t so much as an opera-glass for her to look at the company. “Is he one of those lords your aunt was always talking about in the Plice? Is he your uncle or your grandfather or your first or second cousin? No, he’s too young for your grandfather. What a pity I can’t see if he looks like you!”

At any other time Hyacinth would have thought these inquiries in the worst possible taste, but now he was too much given up to other reflexions. It pleased him that the gentleman in the box should recognise and notice him, because even so small a fact as this was an extension of his social existence; but it no less surprised and puzzled him, producing altogether, in his easily-excited organism, an agitation of which, in spite of his attempted self-control, the air he had for Millicent was the sign. They had met three times, he and his fellow-spectator; but they had met in quarters that, to Hyacinth’s mind, would have made a furtive wink, a mere tremor of the eyelid, a more judicious reference to the fact than so public a salutation. Our friend would never have permitted himself to greet him first, and this was not because the gentleman in the box belonged—conspicuously as he did so—to a different walk of society. He was apparently a man of forty, tall, lean and loose-jointed; he fell into lounging, dawdling attitudes and even at a distance looked lazy. He had a long, amused, contented face, unadorned with moustache or whisker, and his brown hair, parted at the side, came forward on either temple in a rich, well-brushed lock, after the fashion of the portraits of 1820. Millicent had a glance of such range and keenness that she was able to make out the details of his evening-dress, of which she appreciated the “form”; to observe the character of his large hands; and to note that he continually smiled at something, that his eyes were extraordinarily light in colour and that in spite of the dark, well-marked brows arching over them his fine skin never had produced and never would produce a beard of any strength. Our young lady pronounced him mentally a “swell” of the first magnitude and wondered more than ever where he had picked up Hyacinth. Her companion seemed to echo her thought when he exclaimed with a little surprised sigh, almost an exhalation of awe: “Well, I had no idea he was one of that lot!”

“You might at least tell me his name, so that I shall know what to call him when he comes round to speak to us,” the girl said, provoked at her companion’s reserve.

“Comes round to speak to us—a chap like that!” Hyacinth echoed.

“Well, I’m sure if he had been your own brother he couldn’t have grinned at you more! He may want to make my acquaintance after all; he won’t be the first.”

The gentleman had once more retreated from sight, and there was that amount of evidence of the intention she imputed to him. “I don’t think I’m at all clear that I’ve a right to tell his name.” Hyacinth spoke responsibly, yet with all disposition to magnify an incident which deepened the brilliancy of the entertainment he had been able to offer Miss Henning. “I met him in a place where he may not like to have it known he goes.”

“Do you go to places that people are ashamed of? Is it one of your political clubs, as you call them, where that dirty young man from Camberwell, Mr. Monument (what do you call him?), fills your head with ideas that’ll bring you to no good? I’m sure your friend over there doesn’t look as if he’d be on your side.”

Hyacinth had indulged in this reflexion himself; but the only answer he made to Millicent was: “Well then, perhaps he’ll be on yours!”

“Laws, I hope she ain’t one of the aristocracy!” Millicent exclaimed with apparent irrelevance; and following the direction of her eyes Hyacinth saw that the chair his mysterious acquaintance had quitted in the stage-box was now occupied by a lady hitherto invisible—not the one who had given them a glimpse of her shoulder and bare arm. This was an ancient personage muffled in a voluminous and crumpled white shawl—a stout, odd, foreign-looking woman with a fair, nodding, wiggy head. She had a placid, patient air and a round wrinkled face in which, however, a pair of small bright eyes moved quickly enough. Her rather soiled white gloves were too large for her, and round her head, horizontally arranged as if to keep her wig in its place, she wore a narrow band of tinsel decorated in the middle of the forehead by a jewel which the rest of her appearance would lead the spectator to suppose false. “Is the old woman his mother? Where did she dig up her clothes? They look as if she had hired them for the evening. Does she come to your wonderful club too? I daresay she cuts it fine, don’t she?” Millicent went on; and when Hyacinth suggested sportively that the old lady might be not the gentleman’s mother but his wife or his fancy of the moment she declared that in that case, were he to come to see them, she shouldn’t fear for herself. No wonder he wanted to get out of that box! The party in the wig—and what a wig!—was sitting there on purpose to look at them, but she couldn’t say she was particularly honoured by the notice of such an old guy. Hyacinth pretended he quite liked her appearance and admired in her a charm of her own; he offered to bet another paper of peppermints that if they could find out she would be some tremendous old dowager, some one with a handle to her name. To this Millicent replied with an air of experience that she had never thought the greatest beauty was in the upper class; and her companion could see she was covertly looking over her shoulder to watch for his strange clubmate and that she would be disappointed if he didn’t come. This idea didn’t make Hyacinth jealous, for his mind was occupied with another side of the business; and if he offered sportive suggestions it was because he was really excited, was dazzled, by an incident of which the reader will have failed as yet to perceive the larger relations. What moved him was not the pleasure of being patronised by a rich man; it was simply the prospect of new experience—a sensation for which he was always ready to exchange any present boon; and he was convinced that if the gentleman with whom he had conversed in a small occult back room in Bloomsbury as Captain Godfrey Sholto—the Captain had given him his card—had in more positive fashion than by Millicent’s supposing it come out of the stage-box to see him, he would bring with him rare influences. His view of this possibility made suspense akin to preparation; therefore when at the end of a few minutes he became aware that his young woman, with her head turned, was taking the measure of some one who had come in behind them, he felt fate to be doing for him by way of a change as much as could be expected. He got up in his place, but not too soon to see that Captain Sholto had been standing there a moment in contemplation of Millicent and that she on her side had performed with deliberation the ceremony of appraising him. The Captain had his hands in his pockets and wore his crush-hat pushed a good deal back. He laughed to the young couple in the balcony in the friendliest way, as if he had known them both for years, and Millicent could see on a nearer view that he was a fine distinguished easy genial gentleman, at least six feet high in spite of a habit or an affectation of carrying himself in a casual relaxed familiar manner. Hyacinth felt a little, after the first, as if he were treating them rather too much as a pair of children on whom he had stolen to startle them; but this impression was speedily removed by the air with which he said, laying his hand on our hero’s shoulder as he stood in the little passage at the end of the bench where the holders of Mr. Vetch’s order occupied the first seats: “My dear fellow, I really thought I must come round and speak to you. My spirits are all gone with this brute of a play. And those boxes are fearfully stuffy, you know,” he added—quite as if Hyacinth had had at least an equal experience of that part of the theatre.

“It’s hot enough here too,” Millicent’s companion returned. He had suddenly become much more conscious of the high temperature, of his proximity to the fierce chandelier, and he mentioned that the plot of the play certainly was unnatural, though he thought the piece rather well acted.

“Oh, it’s the good old stodgy British tradition. This is the only place where you find it still, and even here it can’t last much longer; it can’t survive old Baskerville and Mrs. Ruffler. ’Gad, how old they are! I remember her, long past her prime, when I used to be taken to the play, as a boy, in the Christmas holidays. Between them they must be something like a hundred and eighty, eh? I believe one’s supposed to cry a good deal about the middle,” Captain Sholto continued in the same friendly familiar encouraging way, addressing himself to Millicent, upon whom indeed his eyes had rested almost uninterruptedly from the start. She sustained his glance with composure, but with just enough of emphasised reserve to intimate (what was perfectly true) that she was not in the habit of conversing with gentlemen with whom she was unacquainted. She turned away her face at this (she had already given the visitor the benefit of a good deal of it) and left him, as in the little passage he leaned against the parapet of the balcony with his back to the stage, facing toward Hyacinth, who was now wondering, with rather more vivid a sense of the relations of things, what he had come for. He wanted to do him honour in return for his civility, but didn’t know what one could talk of at such short notice to a person whom he immediately perceived to be, and the more finely that it was all unaggressively, a man of the world. He instantly saw Captain Sholto didn’t take the play seriously, so that he felt himself warned off that topic, on which otherwise he might have had much to say. On the other hand he couldn’t in the presence of a third person allude to the matters they had discussed at the “Sun and Moon”; nor might he suppose his visitor would expect this, though indeed he impressed him as a man of humours and whims, disposed to amuse himself with everything, including esoteric socialism and a little bookbinder who had so much more of the gentleman about him than one would expect. Captain Sholto may have been slightly embarrassed, now that he was completely launched in his attempt at fraternisation, especially after failing to elicit a smile from Millicent’s rare respectability; but he left to Hyacinth the burden of no initiative and went on to say that it was just this prospect of the dying-out of the old British tradition that had brought him to-night. He was with a friend, a lady who had lived much abroad, who had never seen anything of the kind and who liked everything that was characteristic. “You know the foreign school of acting’s a very different affair,” he said again to Millicent, who this time replied “Oh yes, of course,” and, considering afresh the old woman in the box, reflected that she looked as if there were nothing in the world that she at least hadn’t seen.

“We’ve never been abroad,” Hyacinth candidly said while he looked into his friend’s curious light-coloured eyes, the palest in tint he had ever encountered.

“Oh well, there’s a lot of nonsense talked about that!” Captain Sholto replied; on which Hyacinth remained uncertain of his reference and Millicent decided to volunteer a remark.

“They’re making a tremendous row on the stage. I should think it would be very bad in those boxes.” There was a banging and thumping behind the curtain, the sound of heavy scenery pushed about.

“Oh yes, it’s much better here every way. I think you’ve the best seats in the house,” said their visitor. “I should like very much to finish my evening beside you. The trouble is I’ve ladies—a pair of them,” he pursued as if he were seriously considering this possibility. Then laying his hand again on Hyacinth’s shoulder he smiled at him a moment and indulged in a still greater burst of frankness. “My dear fellow, that’s just what, as a partial reason, has brought me up here to see you. One of my ladies has a great desire to make your acquaintance!”

“To make my acquaintance?” Hyacinth felt himself turn pale; the first impulse he could have in connexion with such an announcement as that—and it lay far down in the depths of the unspeakable—was a conjecture that it had something to do with his parentage on his father’s side. Captain Sholto’s smooth bright face, irradiating such unexpected advances, seemed for an instant to swim before him. The Captain went on to say that he had told the lady of the talks they had had, that she was immensely interested in such matters—“You know what I mean, she really is”—and that as a consequence of what he had said she had begged him to come and ask—a—his young friend (Hyacinth saw in a moment that the Captain had forgotten his name) to look in at her if he didn’t mind.

“She has a tremendous desire to meet some one who looks at the whole business from your standpoint, don’t you see? And in her position she scarcely ever has a chance, she doesn’t come across them—to her great annoyance. So when I spotted you to-night she immediately declared I must introduce you at any cost. I hope you don’t mind just for a quarter of an hour. I ought perhaps to tell you that she’s a person used to having nothing refused her. ‘Go up and bring him down,’ you know, as if it were the simplest thing in the world. She’s really very much in earnest: I don’t mean about wishing to see you—that goes without saying—but about our whole job, yours and mine. Then I should add—it doesn’t spoil anything—that she’s the most charming woman in the world, simply! Honestly, my dear boy, she’s perhaps the most remarkable woman in Europe.”

So Captain Sholto delivered himself, with the highest naturalness and plausibility, and Hyacinth, listening, felt that he himself ought perhaps to resent the idea of being served up for the entertainment of capricious not to say presumptuous triflers, but that somehow he didn’t, and that it was more worthy of the part he aspired to play in life to meet such occasions calmly and urbanely than to take the trouble of avoidance. Of course the lady in the box couldn’t be sincere; she might think she was, though even that was questionable; but you didn’t really care for the cause exemplified in the guarded back room in Bloomsbury when you came to the theatre in that style. It was Captain Sholto’s style as well, but it had been by no means clear to Hyacinth hitherto that he really cared. All the same this was no time for going into the question of the lady’s sincerity, and at the end of sixty seconds our young man had made up his mind that he could afford to indulge her. None the less, I must add, the whole proposal continued to make things dance, to appear fictive and phantasmagoric; so that it sounded in comparison like a note of reality when Millicent, who had been turning from one of the men to the other, exclaimed—

“That’s all very well, but who’s to look after me?” Her assumption of the majestic had broken down and this was the cry of nature.

Nothing could have been pleasanter and more charitable to her alarm than the manner in which Captain Sholto reassured her. “My dear young lady, can you suppose I’ve been unmindful of that? I’ve been hoping that after I’ve taken down our friend and introduced him you might allow me to come back and in his absence occupy his seat.”

Hyacinth was preoccupied with the idea of meeting the most remarkable woman in Europe; but at this juncture he looked at Millicent Henning with some curiosity. She rose grandly to the occasion. “I’m much obliged to you, but I don’t know who you are.”

“Oh, I’ll tell you all about that!” the Captain benevolently cried.

“Of course I should introduce you,” said Hyacinth, and he mentioned to Miss Henning the name of his distinguished acquaintance.

“In the army?” the young lady inquired as if she must have every guarantee of social position.

“Yes—not in the navy! I’ve left the army, but it always sticks to one.”

“Mr. Robinson, is it your intention to leave me?” Millicent asked in a tone of the highest propriety.

Hyacinth’s imagination had taken such a flight that the idea of what he owed to the beautiful girl who had placed herself under his care for the evening had somehow effaced itself. Her words put it before him in a manner that threw him quickly and consciously back on his honour; yet there was something in the way she uttered them that made him look at her harder still before he replied: “Oh dear, no—of course it would never do. I must put off to some other opportunity the honour of making the acquaintance of your friend,” he added to their visitor.

“Ah, my dear fellow, we might manage it so easily now,” this gentleman murmured with evident disappointment. “It’s not as if Miss—a—Miss—a—were to be alone.”

It flashed upon Hyacinth that the root of the project might be a desire of Captain Sholto to insinuate himself into Millicent’s good graces; then he wondered why the most remarkable woman in Europe should lend herself to that design, consenting even to receive a visit from a little bookbinder for the sake of furthering it. Perhaps after all she was not the most remarkable; still, even at a lower estimate, of what advantage could such a complication be to her? To Hyacinth’s surprise Millicent’s face made acknowledgment of his implied renunciation; and she said to Captain Sholto as if she were considering the matter very impartially: “Might one know the name of the lady who sent you?”

“The Princess Casamassima.”

“Laws!” cried Millicent Henning. And then quickly, as if to cover up this crudity: “And might one also know what it is, as you say, that she wants to talk to him about?”

“About the lower orders, the rising democracy, the spread of ideas and all that.”

“The lower orders? Does she think we belong to them?” the girl demanded with a strange provoking laugh.

Captain Sholto was certainly the readiest of men. “If she could see you she’d think you one of the first ladies in the land.”

“She’ll never see me!” Millicent replied in a manner which made it plain that she at least was not to be whistled for.

Being whistled for by a princess presented itself to Hyacinth as an indignity endured gracefully enough by the heroes of several French novels in which he had found a thrilling interest; nevertheless he said incorruptibly to the Captain, who hovered there like a Mephistopheles converted to inscrutable good: “Having been in the army you’ll know that one can’t desert one’s post.”

The Captain, for the third time, laid his hand on his young friend’s shoulder, and for a minute his smile rested in silence on Millicent Henning. “If I tell you simply I want to talk with this young lady, that certainly won’t help me particularly, and there’s no reason why it should. Therefore I’ll tell you the whole truth: I want to talk with her about you!” And he patted Hyacinth in a way which conveyed at once that this idea must surely commend him to the young man’s companion and that he himself liked him infinitely.

Hyacinth was conscious of the endearment, but he put before Millicent that he would do just as she liked; he was determined not to let a member of a justly-doomed patriciate suppose he held any daughter of the people cheap. “Oh, I don’t care if you go,” said Miss Henning. “You had better hurry—the curtain’s going to rise.”

“That’s charming of you! I’ll rejoin you in three minutes!” Captain Sholto exclaimed.

He passed his hand into Hyacinth’s arm, and as our hero lingered still, a little uneasy and questioning Millicent always with his eyes, the girl spoke with her bright boldness: “That kind of princess—I should like to hear all about her.”

“Oh, I’ll tell you that too,” the Captain returned with his perfect ease as he led his young friend away. It must be confessed that Hyacinth also rather wondered what kind of princess she was, and his suspense on this point made his heart beat fast when, after traversing steep staircases and winding corridors, they reached the small door of the stage-box.

XIII

His first consciousness after his companion had opened it was of his proximity to the stage, on which the curtain had now again risen. The play was in progress, the actors’ voices came straight into the box, and it was impossible to speak without disturbing them. This at least was his inference from the noiseless way his conductor drew him in and, without announcing or introducing him, simply pointed to a chair and whispered: “Just drop into that; you’ll see and hear beautifully.” He heard the door close behind him and became aware that Captain Sholto had already retreated. Millicent would at any rate not be left long to languish in solitude. Two ladies were seated in the front of the box, which was so large that there was a considerable space between them; and as he stood there, where Captain Sholto had planted him—they appeared not to have noticed the opening of the door—they turned their heads and looked at him. The one on whom his eyes first rested was the odd party he had already viewed at a distance; she looked queerer still on a closer view and gave him a little friendly gratified nod. The other was partly overshadowed by the curtain of the box, drawn forward with the intention of shielding her from the observation of the house; she had still the air of youth, and the simplest way to express the instant effect upon Hyacinth of her fair face of welcome is to say that she dazzled him. He remained as Sholto had left him, staring rather confusedly and not moving an inch; whereupon the younger lady put out her hand—it was her left, the other rested on the ledge of the box—with the expectation, as he perceived, to his extreme mortification, too late, that he would give her his own. She converted the gesture into a sign of invitation and beckoned him silently but graciously to move his chair forward. He did so and seated himself between the two; then for ten minutes he stared straight before him at the stage, not turning his eyes sufficiently even to glance up at Millicent in the balcony. He looked at the play, but was far from seeing it; he had no sense of anything but the woman who sat there, close to him, on his right, with a fragrance in her garments and a light about her which he seemed to see even while his head was averted. The vision had been only of a moment, but it hung before him, threw a vague white mist over the proceedings on the stage. He was consciously embarrassed, overturned and bewildered; he made a great effort to collect himself, to consider the situation lucidly. He wondered if he ought to speak, to look at her again, to behave differently in some way; if she would take him for a clown, for an idiot; if she were really as beautiful as she had seemed or it were only a superficial glamour which a renewed inspection would dissipate. While he so pondered the minutes lapsed and neither of his hostesses spoke; they watched the play in perfect stillness, so that he divined this to be the proper thing and that he himself must remain dumb until a word should be addressed him. Little by little he recovered himself, took possession of his predicament and at last transferred his eyes to the Princess. She immediately perceived this and returned his glance with a bright benevolence. She might well be a princess—it was impossible to conform more to the finest evocations of that romantic word. She was fair, shining, slender, with an effortless majesty. Her beauty had an air of perfection; it astonished and lifted one up, the sight of it seemed a privilege, a reward. If the first impression it had given Hyacinth was to make him feel strangely transported he need still not have set that down to his simplicity, for this was the effect the Princess Casamassima produced on persons of a wider experience and greater pretensions. Her dark eyes, blue or grey, something that was not brown, were as kind as they were splendid, and there was an extraordinary light nobleness in the way she held her head. That head, where two or three diamond stars glittered in the thick, delicate hair which defined its shape, suggested to Hyacinth something antique and celebrated, something he had admired of old—the memory was vague—in a statue, in a picture, in a museum. Purity of line and form, of cheek and chin and lip and brow, a colour that seemed to live and glow, a radiance of grace and eminence and success—these things were seated in triumph in the face of the Princess, and her visitor, as he held himself in his chair trembling with the revelation, questioned if she were really of the same substance with the humanity he had hitherto known. She might be divine, but he could see she understood human needs—that she wished him to be at his ease and happy; there was something familiar in her benignity, as if she had seen him many times before. Her dress was dark and rich; she had pearls round her neck and an old rococo fan in her hand. He took in all these things and finally said to himself that if she wanted nothing more of him he was content, he would like it to go on; so pleasant was it to be enthroned with fine ladies in a dusky, spacious receptacle which framed the bright picture of the stage and made one’s own situation seem a play within the play. The act was a long one, and the repose in which his companions left him might have been a calculated charity, to enable him to get used to them, to see how harmless they were. He looked at Millicent in the course of time and saw that Captain Sholto, seated beside her, had not the same standard of propriety, inasmuch as he made a remark to her every few minutes. Like himself the young lady in the balcony was losing the play, thanks to her so keeping her eyes on her friend from Lomax Place, whose position she thus endeavoured to gauge. He had quite given up the Paraguayan complications; by the end of the half-hour his attention might have come back to them had he not then been engaged in wondering what the Princess would say to him after the descent of the curtain—or if she would say anything. The consideration of this problem as the moment of the solution drew nearer made his heart again beat fast. He watched the old lady on his left and supposed it was natural a princess should have an attendant—he took for granted she was an attendant—as different as possible from herself. This ancient dame was without majesty or grace; huddled together with her hands folded on her stomach and her lips protruding, she solemnly followed the performance. Several times, however, she turned her head to Hyacinth, and then her expression changed; she repeated the jovial, encouraging, almost motherly nod with which she had greeted him on his making his bow and by which she appeared to wish to intimate that, better than the serene beauty on the other side, she could enter into the full anomaly of his situation. She seemed to argue that he must keep his head and that if the worst should come to the worst she was there to look after him. Even when at last the curtain descended it was some moments before the Princess spoke, though she rested her smile on her guest as if she were considering what he would best like her to say. He might at that instant have guessed what he discovered later—that among this lady’s faults (he was destined to learn they were numerous) not the least eminent was an exaggerated fear of the commonplace. He expected she would make some remark about the play, but what she said was, very gently and kindly, “I like to know all sorts of people.”

“I shouldn’t think you’d find the least difficulty in that,” Hyacinth replied.

“Oh, if one wants anything very much it’s sure to be difficult. Every one isn’t so obliging as you.”

Hyacinth could think immediately of no proper answer to this, but the old lady saved him the trouble by declaring with a foreign accent: “I think you were most extraordinarily good-natured. I had no idea you’d come—to two strange women.”

“Yes, we’re strange women,” said the Princess musingly.

“It’s not true she finds things difficult; she makes every one do everything,” her companion went on.

The Princess glanced at her and then remarked to Hyacinth: “Her name is Madame Grandoni.” The tone was not familiar, but there was a happy shade in it, as if he had really taken so much trouble for them that it was but just he should be entertained a little at their expense. It seemed to imply also that Madame Grandoni’s fitness for supplying such entertainment was obvious.

“But I’m not Italian—ah no!” the old lady cried. “In spite of my name I’m an honest, ugly, unfortunate German. But cela n’a pas d’importance. She also, with such a name, isn’t Italian either. It’s an accident; the world’s full of accidents. But she isn’t German, poor lady, any more.” Madame Grandoni appeared to have entered into the Princess’s view, and Hyacinth thought her exceedingly droll. In a moment she added: “That was a very charming person you were with.”

“Yes, she’s very charming,” Hyacinth replied, not sorry to have a chance to say it.

The Princess made no remark on this subject, and Hyacinth saw not only that from her position in the box she could have had no glimpse of Millicent, but that she would never take up such an allusion as that. It was as if she had not heard it that she asked: “Do you find the play very interesting?”

He hesitated, then told the simple truth. “I must confess I’ve lost the whole of this last act.”

“Ah, poor bothered young man!” cried Madame Grandoni. “You see—you see!”

“What do I see?” the Princess inquired. “If you’re annoyed at being here now you’ll like us later; probably at least. We take a great interest in the things you care for. We take a great interest in the people,” the Princess went on.

“Oh, allow me, allow me, and speak only for yourself!” the elder lady interposed. “I take no interest whatever in the people; I don’t understand them and I know nothing about them. An honourable nature, of any class, I always respect; but I won’t pretend to a passion for the ignorant masses, because I have it not. Moreover that doesn’t touch the gentleman.”

The Princess Casamassima had a clear faculty of completely ignoring things of which she wished to take no account; it was not in the least the air of contempt, but thoughtful, tranquil, convenient absence, after which she came back to the point where she wished to be. She made no protest against her companion’s speech, but said to Hyacinth, as if vaguely conscious she had been committing herself in some absurd way: “She lives with me; she’s everything to me; she’s the best woman in the world.”

“Yes, fortunately, with many superficial defects I’m as good as good bread,” Madame Grandoni conceded.

Hyacinth was by this time less embarrassed than when he had presented himself, but he was not less mystified; he wondered afresh if he were not being practised on for some inconceivable end: so strangely did it strike him that two such products of another world than his own should of their own movement take the trouble to explain each other to a dire little bookbinder. This idea made him flush; it might have come over him that he had fallen into a trap. He was conscious he looked frightened, and he was conscious the moment afterwards that the Princess noticed it. This was apparently what made her say: “If you’ve lost so much of the play I ought to tell you what has happened.”

“Do you think he would follow that any more?” Madame Grandoni asked.

“If you would tell me—if you would tell me—!” And then Hyacinth stopped. He had been going to say “If you would tell me what all this means and what you want of me it would be more to the point!” but the words died on his lips and he sat staring, for the woman at his right hand was simply too beautiful. She was too beautiful to question, to judge by common logic; and how could he know, moreover, what was natural to a person in that exaltation of grace and splendour? Perhaps it was her habit to send out every evening for some witless stranger to amuse her; perhaps that was the way the foreign aristocracy lived. There was no sharpness in her face—for the present hour at least: there was nothing but luminous charity, yet she looked as if she knew what was going on in his mind. She made no eager attempt to reassure him, but there was a world almost of direct tenderness in the tone in which she said: “Do you know I’m afraid I’ve already forgotten what they have been doing—? It’s terribly complicated; some one or other was hurled over a precipice.”

“Ah, you’re a brilliant pair,” Madame Grandoni declared with a laugh of long experience. “I could describe everything. The person who was hurled over the precipice was the virtuous hero, and you’ll see him in the next act all the better for it.”

“Don’t describe anything; I’ve so much to ask.” Hyacinth had looked away in tacit deprecation at hearing himself “paired” with the Princess, and he felt she was watching him. “What do you think of Captain Sholto?” she went on suddenly, to his surprise, if anything in his position could excite surprise more than anything else; and as he hesitated, not knowing what to say, she added: “Isn’t he a very curious type?”

“I know him very little.” But he had no sooner uttered the words than it struck him they were far from brilliant, were poor and flat and very little calculated to satisfy the Princess. Indeed he had said nothing at all that could place him in a favourable light; so he continued at a venture: “I mean I’ve never seen him at home.” That sounded still more silly.

“At home? Oh, he’s never at home; he’s all over the world. To-night he was as likely to have been in Paraguay for instance—though what a place to be!” she smiled—“as here. He is what they call a cosmopolite. I don’t know if you know that species; very modern, more and more frequent and exceedingly tiresome. I prefer the Chinese. He had told me he had had a lot of very interesting talk with you. That was what made me say: ‘Oh, do ask him to come in and see me. A little interesting talk, that would be a change!’”

“She’s very complimentary to me!” said Madame Grandoni.

“Ah my dear, you and I, you know, we never talk: we understand each other without that!” Then the Princess pursued, addressing herself to Hyacinth: “Do you never admit women?”

“Admit women—?”

“Into those séances—what do you call them?—those little meetings that Captain Sholto describes to me. I should like so much to be present. Why not?”

“I haven’t seen any ladies,” Hyacinth said. “I don’t know if it’s a rule, but I’ve seen nothing but men”; and he subjoined, smiling, though he thought the dereliction rather serious and couldn’t understand the part Captain Sholto was playing, nor, considering the grand company he kept, how he had originally secured admittance into the subversive little circle in Bloomsbury: “You know I’m not sure he ought to go about reporting our proceedings.”

“I see. Perhaps you think he’s a spy, an agent provocateur or something of that sort.”

“No,” said Hyacinth after a moment. “I think a spy would be more careful—would disguise himself more. Besides, after all, he has heard very little.” He spoke as with mild amusement.

“You mean he hasn’t really been behind the scenes?” the Princess asked, bending forward a little and now covering the young man steadily with her beautiful deep eyes, as if by this time he must have got used to her and wouldn’t flinch from such attention. “Of course he hasn’t,” she said of herself, however, “and he never will be. He knows that, and that it’s quite out of his power to tell any real secrets. What he repeated to me was interesting, but of course I could see there was nothing the authorities anywhere could put their hand on. It was mainly the talk he had had with you which struck him so very much, and which struck me, as I tell you. Perhaps you didn’t know how he was drawing you out.”

“I’m afraid that’s rather easy,” said Hyacinth with perfect candour; for it came over him that he had chattered with a vengeance in Bloomsbury and had thought it natural enough there that his sociable fellow-visitor should offer him cigars and attach importance to the views of a clever and original young artisan.

“I’m not sure that I find it so! However, I ought to tell you that you needn’t have the least fear of Captain Sholto. He’s a perfectly honest man, so far as he goes; and even if you had trusted him much more than you appear to have done he’d be incapable of betraying you. However, don’t trust him: not because he’s not safe, but because—!” She took herself up. “No matter, you’ll see for yourself. He has gone into that sort of thing simply to please me. I should tell you, merely to make you understand, that he would do anything for that. That’s his own affair. I wanted to know something, to learn something, to ascertain what really is going on; and for a woman everything of that sort’s so difficult, especially for a woman in my position, who’s tiresomely known and to whom every sort of bad faith is sure to be imputed. So Sholto said he would look into the subject for me. Poor man, he has had to look into so many subjects! What I particularly wanted was that he should make friends with some of the leading spirits, really characteristic types.” The Princess’s voice was low and rather deep, but her tone perfectly natural and easy, with a charming assumption—for you could call it nothing else—of more wonderful things than he could count. Her manner of speaking was in fact altogether new to her listener, for whom the pronunciation of her words and the very punctuation of her sentences were the revelation of what he supposed to be society—the very Society to the destruction of which he was dedicated.

“Surely Captain Sholto doesn’t suppose I’m a leading spirit!” he exclaimed with the resolve not to be laughed at any more than he could help.

“He told me you were very original.”

“He doesn’t know, and—if you’ll allow me to say so—I don’t think you know. How should you? I’m one of many thousands of young men of my class—you know, I suppose, what that is—in whose brains certain ideas are fermenting. There’s nothing original about me at all. I’m very young and very ignorant; it’s only a few months since I began to talk of the possibility of a social revolution with men who have considered the whole ground much more than I could possibly do. I’m a mere particle,” Hyacinth wound up, “in the grey immensity of the people. All I pretend to is my good faith and a great desire that justice shall be done.”

The Princess listened to him intently and her attitude made him feel how little he, in comparison, expressed himself like a person who had the habit of conversation; he seemed to himself to betray ridiculous effort, to stammer and emit vulgar sounds. For a moment she said nothing, only looking at him with her exquisite smile. “I do draw you out!” she exclaimed at last. “You’re much more interesting to me than if you were an exception.” At these last words Hyacinth flinched a hair’s breadth; the movement was shown by his dropping his eyes. We know to what extent he really regarded himself as of the stuff of the common herd. The Princess doubtless guessed it as well, for she quickly added: “At the same time I can see you’re remarkable enough.”

“What do you think I’m remarkable for?”

“Well, you’ve general ideas.”

“Every one has them to-day. They have them in Bloomsbury to a terrible degree. I’ve a friend (who understands the matter much better than I) who has no patience with them: he declares they’re our folly, our danger and our bane. A few very special ideas—if they’re the right ones—are what we want.”

“Who’s your friend?” the Princess asked abruptly.

“Ah, Christina, Christina!” Madame Grandoni murmured from the other side of the box.

Christina took no notice of her, and Hyacinth, not understanding the warning and only remembering how personal women always are, replied: “A young man who lives in Camberwell and who’s in the employ of a big wholesale chemist.”

If he had designed in this description of his friend a stronger dose than his hostess would be able to digest he was greatly mistaken. She seemed to gaze tenderly at the picture suggested by his words, and she immediately inquired if the young man were also clever and if she mightn’t hope to know him. Hadn’t Captain Sholto seen him, and if so why hadn’t he spoken of him too? When Hyacinth had replied that Captain Sholto had probably seen him, but, as he believed, had had no particular conversation with him, the Princess asked with startling frankness if her visitor wouldn’t bring the person so vividly described some day to see her.

Hyacinth glanced at Madame Grandoni, but that worthy woman was engaged in a survey of the house through an old-fashioned eyeglass with a long gilt handle. He had perceived much before this that the Princess Casamassima had no desire for vain phrases, and he had the good taste to feel that from himself to such a great lady compliments, even had he wished to pay them, would have had no suitability. “I don’t know whether he would be willing to come. He’s the sort of man that in such a case you can’t answer for.”

“That makes me want to know him all the more. But you’ll come yourself at all events, eh?”

Poor Hyacinth murmured something about the unexpected honour; after all he had a French heredity and it wasn’t so easy for him to say things as ill as his other idiom mainly required. But Madame Grandoni, laying down her eyeglass, almost took the words out of his mouth with the cheerful exhortation: “Go and see her—go and see her once or twice. She’ll treat you like an angel.”

“You must think me very peculiar,” the Princess remarked sadly.

“I don’t know what I think. It will take a good while.”

“I wish I could make you trust me—inspire you with confidence,” she went on. “I don’t mean only you personally, but others who think as you do. You’d find I’d go with you—pretty far. I was answering just now for Captain Sholto; but who in the world’s to answer for me?” And her sadness merged itself in a smile that affected Hyacinth as indescribably magnanimous and touching.

“Not I, my dear, I promise you!” her ancient companion ejaculated with a laugh which made the people in the stalls look up at the box.

Her spirit was contagious; it gave Hyacinth the audacity to say to her, “I’d trust you, if you did!” though he felt the next minute that this was even a more familiar speech than if he had expressed a want of confidence.

“It comes then to the same thing,” said the Princess. “She wouldn’t show herself with me in public if I weren’t respectable. If you knew more about me you’d understand what has led me to turn my attention to the great social question. It’s a long story and the details wouldn’t interest you; but perhaps some day, if we have more talk, you’ll put yourself a little in my place. I’m very serious, you know; I’m not amusing myself with peeping and running away. I’m convinced that we’re living in a fool’s paradise, that the ground’s heaving under our feet.”

“It’s not the ground, my dear; it’s you who are turning somersaults,” Madame Grandoni interposed.

“Ah you, my friend, you’ve the happy faculty of believing what you like to believe. I have to believe what I see.”

“She wishes to throw herself into the revolution, to guide it, to enlighten it,” Madame Grandoni said to Hyacinth, speaking now with imperturbable gravity.

“I’m sure she could direct it in any sense she would wish!” the young man responded in his glow. The pure, high dignity with which the Princess had just spoken and which appeared to cover a suppressed tremor of passion set his pulses throbbing, and though he scarcely saw what she meant—her aspirations appearing as yet so vague—her tone, her voice, her wonderful face showed she had a generous soul.

She answered his eager declaration with a serious smile and a melancholy head-shake. “I’ve no such pretensions and my good old friend’s laughing at me. Of course that’s very easy; for what in fact can be more absurd on the face of it than for a woman with a title, with diamonds, with a carriage, with servants, with a position, as they call it, to sympathise with the upward struggles of those who are below? ‘Give all that up and we’ll believe you,’ you’ve a right to say. I’m ready to give them up the moment it will help the cause; I assure you that’s the least difficulty. I don’t want to teach, I want to learn; and above all I want to know à quoi m’en tenir. Are we on the eve of great changes or are we not? Is everything that’s gathering force underground, in the dark, in the night, in little hidden rooms, out of sight of governments and policemen and idiotic ‘statesmen’—heaven save them!—is all this going to burst forth some fine morning and set the world on fire? Or is it to sputter out and spend itself in vain conspiracies, be dissipated in sterile heroisms and abortive isolated movements? I want to know à quoi m’en tenir,” she repeated, fixing her visitor with more brilliant eyes and almost as if he could tell her on the spot. Then suddenly she added in quite a different tone: “Pardon me, I’ve an idea you know French. Didn’t Captain Sholto tell me so?”

“I’ve some little acquaintance with it,” Hyacinth replied. “I’ve French blood in my veins.”

She considered him as if he had proposed to her some attaching problem. “Yes, I can see you’re not le premier venu. Now your friend, of whom you were speaking, is a chemist; and you yourself—what’s your occupation?”

“I’m just a bookbinder.”

“That must be delightful. I wonder if you’d bind me some books.”

“You’d have to bring them to our shop, and I can do there only the work that’s given out to me. I might manage it by myself at home,” Hyacinth freely professed.

“I should like that better. And what do you call home?”

“The place I live in, in the north of London: a little street you certainly never heard of.”

“What is it called?”

“Lomax Place, at your service,” he laughed.

She seemed to reflect his innocent gaiety; she wasn’t a bit afraid to let him see she liked him. “No, I don’t think I’ve heard of it. I don’t know London very well; I haven’t lived here long. I’ve spent most of my life abroad. My husband’s a foreigner, a South Italian. We don’t live always together. I haven’t the manners of this country—not of any class, have I, eh? Oh this country—there’s a great deal to be said about it and a great deal to be done, as you of course understand better than any one. But I want to know London; it interests me more than I can say—the huge, swarming, smoky, human city. I mean real London, the people and all their sufferings and passions; not Park Lane and Bond Street. Perhaps you can help me—it would be a great kindness: that’s what I want to know men like you for. You see it isn’t idle, my having given you so much trouble to-night.”

“I shall be very glad to show you all I know. But it isn’t much and above all it isn’t pretty,” said Hyacinth.

“Whom do you live with in Lomax Place?” she asked, a little oddly, by way of allowance for this.

“Captain Sholto’s leaving the young lady—he’s coming back here,” Madame Grandoni announced, inspecting the balcony with her instrument. The orchestra had been for some time playing the overture to the following act.

Hyacinth had just hesitated. “I live with a dressmaker.”

“With a dressmaker? Do you mean—do you mean—?” But the Princess paused.

“Do you mean she’s your wife?” asked Madame Grandoni more bravely.

“Perhaps she gives you rooms,” the Princess suggested.

“How many do you think I have? She gives me everything, or has done so in the past. She brought me up; she’s the best little woman in the world.”

“You had better command a dress of her,” Madame Grandoni threw off.

“And your family, where are they?” the Princess continued.

“I have no family.”

“None at all?”

“None at all. I never had.”

“But the French blood you speak of and which I see perfectly in your face—you haven’t the English expression or want of expression—that must have come to you through some one.”

“Yes, through my mother.”

“And she’s dead?”

“Long ago.”

“That’s a great loss, because French mothers are usually so much to their sons.” The Princess looked at her painted fan as she opened and closed it; after which she said: “Well then, you’ll come some day. We’ll arrange it.” Hyacinth felt the answer to this could be only a silent inclination of his utmost stature, and to make it he rose from his chair. As he stood there, conscious he had stayed long enough and yet not knowing exactly how to withdraw, the Princess, with her fan closed, resting upright on her knee, and her hands clasped on the end of it, turned up her strange lovely eyes at him and said: “Do you think anything will occur soon?”

“Will occur—?”

“That there’ll be a crisis—that you’ll make yourselves felt?”

In this beautiful woman’s face there was to his bewildered perception something at once inspiring, tempting and mocking; and the effect of her expression was to make him say rather clumsily, “I’ll try and ascertain—” as if she had asked him whether her carriage were at the door.

“I don’t quite know what you’re talking about; but please don’t have it for another hour or two. I want to see what becomes of the Pearl!” Madame Grandoni interposed.

“Remember what I told you: I’d give up everything—everything!” And the Princess kept looking up at him. Then she held out her hand, and this time he knew sufficiently what he was about to take it.

When he bade good-night to Madame Grandoni the old lady sounded at him with a comical sigh, “Well, she is respectable!” and out in the lobby when he had closed the door of the box behind him he found himself echoing these words and repeating mechanically, “She is respectable!” They were on his lips as he stood suddenly face to face with Captain Sholto, who grasped his shoulder once more and shook him in that free yet insinuating manner for which this officer appeared remarkable.

“My dear fellow, you were born under a lucky star.”

“I never supposed it,” said Hyacinth, changing colour.

“Why what in the world would you have? You’ve the faculty, the precious faculty, of inspiring women with an interest—but an interest!”

“Yes, ask them in the box there! I behaved like an awful muff,” Hyacinth declared, overwhelmed now with a sense of opportunities missed.

“They won’t tell me that. And the lady upstairs?”

“Well,” said Hyacinth gravely, “what about her?”

“She wouldn’t talk to me of anything but you. You may imagine how I liked it!”

“I don’t like it either. But I must go up.”

“Oh yes, she counts the minutes. Such a charming person!” Captain Sholto added with more propriety of tone. As Hyacinth left him he called out: “Don’t be afraid—you’ll go far.”

When the young man took his place in the balcony beside Millicent she gave him no greeting nor asked any question about his adventures in the more privileged part of the house. She only turned her fine complexion upon him for some minutes, and as he himself was not in the mood to begin to chatter the silence continued—continued till after the curtain had risen on the last act of the play. Millicent’s attention was now evidently not at her disposal for the stage, and in the midst of a violent scene which included pistol-shots and shrieks she said at last to her companion: “She’s a tidy lot, your Princess, by what I learn.”

“Pray what do you know about her?”

“I know what that fellow told me.”

“And what may that have been?”

“Well, she’s a bad ’un as ever was. Her own husband has had to turn her out of the house.”

Hyacinth remembered the allusion the lady herself had made to her matrimonial situation; in spite of which he would have liked to be able to reply to Miss Henning that he didn’t believe a word of it. He withheld the doubt and after a moment simply remarked: “Well, I don’t care.”

“You don’t care? Well, I do then!” Millicent cried. And as it was impossible in view of the performance and the jealous attention of their neighbours to continue the conversation at this pitch, she contented herself with ejaculating in a somewhat lower key at the end of five minutes during which she had been watching the stage: “Gracious, what dreadful common stuff!” Hyacinth then wondered if Captain Sholto had given her this formula.

XIV

He didn’t mention to Pinnie or Mr. Vetch that he had been taken up by a great lady; but he mentioned it to Paul Muniment, to whom he now confided a great many things. He had at first been in considerable fear of his straight loud north-country friend, who showed signs of cultivating logic and criticism in a degree that was hostile to fine loose talk; but he discovered in him later a man to whom one could say anything in the world if one didn’t think it of more importance to be sympathised with than to be understood. For a revolutionist he was strangely unexasperated, was indulgent even to contempt. The sight of all the things he wanted to change had seemingly no power to irritate him, and if he joked about questions that lay very near his heart his humour had no ferocity—the fault Hyacinth sometimes found with it rather was that it was innocent to puerility. Our hero envied his power of combining a care for the wide misery of mankind with the apparent state of mind of the cheerful and virtuous young workman who of a Sunday morning has put on a clean shirt and, not having taken the gilt off his wages the night before, weighs against each other, for a happy day, the respective attractions of Epping Forest and Gravesend. He never dragged in with the least snarl his personal lot and his daily life; it had not seemed to occur to him for instance that “society” was really responsible for the condition of his sister’s spinal column, though Eustache Poupin and his wife (who practically, however, were as patient as he) did everything they could to make him say so, believing evidently that it would relieve him. Apparently he cared nothing for women, talked of them rarely and always decently, and had never a sign of a sweetheart save in so far as Lady Aurora Langrish might pass for one. He never drank a drop of beer nor touched a pipe; he always had a clear tone, a fresh cheek and a merely, an imperturbably intelligent eye, and once excited on Hyacinth’s part a kind of elder-brotherly indulgence by the open-mouthed glee and credulity with which, when the pair were present, in the sixpenny gallery, at Astley’s, at an equestrian pantomime, he followed the tawdry spectacle. He once pronounced the young bookbinder a suggestive little beggar, and Hyacinth’s opinion of him was by this time so exalted that the remark had almost the value of a patent of nobility. Our hero treated himself to a high unlimited faith in him; he had always dreamed of some grand friendship and this was the best opening he had yet encountered. No one could entertain a sentiment of that sort more nobly, more ingeniously than Hyacinth, or cultivate with more art the intimate personal relation. It disappointed him sometimes that his confidence was not more unreservedly repaid; that on certain important points of the socialistic programme Muniment would never commit himself and had not yet shown the fond du sac, as Eustache Poupin called it, to so ardent an admirer. He answered particular appeals freely enough, and answered them occasionally in a manner that made Hyacinth jump, as when in reply to a question about his attitude on capital punishment he said that so far from wishing it abolished he should go in for extending it much further—he should impose it on those who habitually lied or got drunk; but his friend had always a feeling that he kept back his best card and that even in the listening circle in Bloomsbury, when only the right men were present, there were unspoken conclusions in his mind which he didn’t as yet think any one good enough to be favoured with. So far therefore from suspecting him of any real poverty of programme Hyacinth was sure he had extraordinary things in his head; that he was thinking them out to the logical end, wherever it might land him; and that the night he should produce them with the door of the club-room guarded and the company bound by a tremendous oath the others would look at each other, gasp and turn pale.

“She wants to see you; she asked me to bring you; she was very serious,” our young man meanwhile said, reporting his interview with the ladies in the box at the play; which, however, now that he looked back upon it, seemed as queer as a dream and not much more likely than that sort of experience to have a continuation in one’s waking hours.

“To bring me—to bring me where?” asked Muniment. “You talk as if I were a sample out of your shop or a little dog you had for sale. Has she ever seen me? Does she think I’m smaller than you? What does she know about me?”

“Well, principally that you’re a friend of mine—that’s enough for her.”

“Do you mean it ought to be enough for me that she’s a friend of yours? I’ve a notion you’ll have some queer ones before you’ve done; a good many more than I have time to talk to. And how can I go to see a delicate female with those paws?” Muniment said as he exhibited ten work-stained fingers.

“Buy a pair of gloves—” Hyacinth recognised the serious character of this obstacle. But after a moment he added: “No, you oughtn’t to do that. She wants to see dirty hands.”

“That’s easy enough, good Lord! She needn’t send for me for the purpose. But isn’t she making game of you?”

“It’s very possible, but I don’t see what good it can do her.”

“You’re not obliged to find excuses for the pampered classes. Their bloated luxury begets evil, impudent desires; they’re capable of doing harm for the sake of harm. Besides, is she genuine?”

“If she isn’t, what becomes of your explanation?” Hyacinth asked.

“Oh, it doesn’t matter; at night all cats are grey. Whatever she is, she’s an idle, bedizened trifler; perhaps even a real profligate female.”

“If you had seen her you wouldn’t talk of her that way.”

“God forbid I should see her then, if she’s going to corrupt me!”

“Do you suppose she’ll corrupt me?” Hyacinth demanded with an expression of face and a tone of voice which produced on his friend’s part an explosion of mirth.

“How can she, after all, when you’re already such a little mass of corruption?”

“You don’t think that—?” and Hyacinth looked very grave.

“Do you mean that if I did I wouldn’t say it? Haven’t you noticed that I say what I think?”

“No, you don’t, not half of it: you’re as dark as a fish.”

Paul Muniment glanced at his friend as if rather struck with the penetration of that remark; then he said: “Well then, if I should give you the other half of my opinion of you do you think you’d fancy it?”

“I’ll save you the trouble. I’m a very clever, conscientious, promising young chap, and any one would be proud to claim me as a friend.”

“Is that what your Princess told you? She must be a precious piece of goods!” Paul exclaimed. “Did she pick your pocket meanwhile?”

“Oh yes; a few minutes later I missed a silver cigar-case engraved with the arms of the Robinsons. Seriously,” Hyacinth continued, “don’t you consider it possible that a woman of that class should want to know what’s going on among the like of us?”

“It depends on what class you mean.”

“Well, a woman with a lot of wonderful jewels and wonderful scents and the manners of an angel. I wonder if even the young ladies in the perfumery shops have such manners—they can’t have such pearls. It’s queer of course, that sort of interest, but it’s conceivable; why not? There may be unselfish natures; there may be disinterested feelings.”

“And there may be fine ladies in an awful funk about their jewels and even about their manners. Seriously, as you say, it’s perfectly conceivable. I’m not in the least surprised at the aristocracy being curious to know what we’re up to and wanting very much to look into it. In their place I should be very uneasy, and if I were a woman with angelic manners very likely I too should be glad to get hold of a soft susceptible little bookbinder and pump him dry, bless his tender heart!”

“Are you afraid I’ll tell her secrets?” cried Hyacinth, flushing with virtuous indignation.

“Secrets? What secrets could you tell her, my pretty lad?”

Hyacinth turned away. “You don’t trust me—you never have.”

“We will, some day—don’t be afraid,” said Muniment, who evidently had no intention of harshness, at least in respect to Hyacinth, a thing that appeared impossible to him. “And when we do you’ll cry with disappointment.”

“Well, you won’t,” Hyacinth returned. And then he asked if his friend thought the Princess Casamassima a spy of spies—the devil she’d have to be!—and why, if she were in that line, Sholto was not, since it must be supposed he was not when they had seen fit to let him walk in and out, at any rate, at the place in Bloomsbury. Muniment didn’t even know whom he meant, not having had any relations with the gentleman; but he summoned a sufficient image after his companion had described the Captain’s appearance. He then remarked with his usual geniality that he didn’t take him for anything worse than a jackass; but even if he had edged himself into the place with every intention to betray them what handle could he possibly get—what use against them could he make of anything he had seen or heard? If he had a fancy to dip into workingmen’s clubs (Paul remembered now the first night he came; he had been brought by that German cabinet-maker who always had a bandaged neck and smoked a pipe with a bowl as big as a stove); if it amused him to put on a bad hat and inhale foul tobacco and call his “inferiors” “my dear fellow”; if he thought that in doing so he was getting an insight into the people and going halfway to meet them and preparing for what was coming—all this was his own affair and he was very welcome, though a man must be a flat who would spend his evening in a hole like that when he might enjoy his comfort in one of those flaming big shops, full of armchairs and flunkies, in Pall Mall. And what did he see after all in Bloomsbury? Nothing but a remarkably stupid “social gathering” where there were clay pipes and a sanded floor and not half enough gas and the principal papers; and where the men, as any one would know, were advanced radicals and mostly advanced idiots. He could pat as many of them on the back as he liked and say the House of Lords wouldn’t last till midsummer; but what discoveries would he make? He was simply on the same lay as Hyacinth’s Princess; he was nervous and scared and thought he would see for himself.

“Oh, he isn’t the same sort as the Princess. I’m sure he’s in a very different line!” Hyacinth objected.

“Different of course; she’s a handsome woman, I suppose, and he’s an ugly man; but I don’t think that either of them will save us or spoil us. Their curiosity’s natural, but I’ve other things to do than to show them over: therefore you can tell her Serene Highness that I’m much obliged.”

Hyacinth reflected a moment and then said: “You show Lady Aurora over; you seem to wish to give her the information she desires; therefore what’s the difference? If it’s right for her to take an interest why isn’t it right for my Princess?”

“If she’s already yours what more can she want?” Muniment asked. “All I know of Lady Aurora and all I look at is that she comes and sits with Rosy and brings her tea and waits on her. If the Princess will do as much I’ll see what I can do; but apart from that I shall never take a grain of interest in her interest in the masses—or in this particular mass!” And Paul, with his discoloured thumb, designated his own substantial person. His tone was disappointing to Hyacinth, who was surprised at his not appearing to think the incident at the theatre more remarkable and romantic. He seemed to regard his mate’s explanation of the passage as all-sufficient; but when a moment later he made use, in referring to the mysterious lady, of the expression that she was “quaking” that critic broke out: “Never in the world; she’s not afraid of anything!”

“Ah, my lad, not afraid of you, evidently!” Hyacinth paid no attention to this coarse sally, but resumed with a candour that was proof against further ridicule: “Do you think she can do me a hurt of any kind if we follow up our acquaintance?”

“Yes, very likely, but you must hit her back and give it to her badly. That’s your line, you know—to go in for what’s going, to live your life, to gratify the ‘sex.’ I’m an ugly, grimy brute, I’ve got to watch the fires and mind the shop; but you’re one of those taking little beggars who must run about and see the world. You ought to be an ornament to society, like a young man in an illustrated storybook. Only you know,” Muniment added in a moment, “if she should hurt you very much I would have a go at her!”

Hyacinth had been intending for some time to take Pinnie to call on the prostrate damsel in Audley Court, to whom he had promised that his benefactress (he had told Rose Muniment she was his godmother—it sounded so right) should pay this civility; but the affair had been delayed by wan hesitations on the part of the dressmaker, the poor woman having hard work to imagine to-day that there were people in London forlorn enough for her countenance to be of value to them. Her social curiosity had quite died out and she knew she no longer made the same figure in public as when her command of the fashions enabled her to illustrate them in her own little person by the aid of a good deal of whalebone. Moreover she felt that Hyacinth had strange friends and still stranger opinions; she suspected him of taking an unnatural interest in politics and of being somehow not on the right side, little as she knew about parties or causes; and she had a vague conviction that this kind of perversity only multiplied the troubles of the poor, who, according to theories which Pinnie had never reasoned out but which in her breast were as deep as religion, ought always to be of the same way of thinking as the rich. They were unlike them enough in their poverty without trying to add other differences. When at last she accompanied Hyacinth to Camberwell one Saturday evening at midsummer it was in a sighing, sceptical, second-best manner; but if he had told her he wished it she would have gone with him to a soiree at a scavenger’s. There was no more danger of Rose Muniment’s being out than that one of the bronze couchant lions in Trafalgar Square should have walked down Whitehall; but he had let her know in advance and he perceived, as he opened her door in obedience to a quick, shrill summons, that she had had the happy thought of inviting Lady Aurora to help her entertain Miss Pynsent. Such at least was the inference he drew from seeing her ladyship’s memorable figure rise before him for the first time since their meeting there. He presented his companion to their reclining hostess, and Rosy immediately repeated her name to the representative of Belgrave Square. Pinnie curtseyed down to the ground as Lady Aurora put out her hand to her, and then slipped noiselessly into a chair beside the bed. Lady Aurora laughed and fidgeted in a friendly, cheerful, yet at the same time rather pointless manner, and Hyacinth gathered that she had no recollection of having seen him. His attention, however, was mainly given to Pinnie: he watched her jealously, to see if on this important occasion she wouldn’t put forth a certain stiff, quaint, polished politeness of which she possessed the secret and which made him liken her extraction of the sense of things to the nip of a pair of old-fashioned silver sugar-tongs. Not only for Pinnie’s sake but for his own as well he wished her to figure as a superior little woman; so he hoped she wouldn’t lose her head if Rosy should begin to talk about Inglefield. She was evidently much impressed by Rosy and kept repeating “Dear, dear!” under her breath while the small strange person in the bed rapidly explained to her that there was nothing in the world she would have liked so much as to follow her delightful profession, but that she couldn’t sit up to it, and had never had a needle in her hand but once, when at the end of three minutes it had dropped into the sheets and got into the mattress, so that she had always been afraid it would work out again and stick into her: which it hadn’t done yet and perhaps never would—she lay so quiet, pushing it about so little. “Perhaps you’d think it’s me that trimmed the little handkerchief I wear round my neck,” Miss Muniment said; “perhaps you’d think I couldn’t do less, lying here all day long with complete command of my time. Not a stitch of it. I’m the finest lady in London; I never lift my finger for myself. It’s a present from her ladyship—it’s her ladyship’s own beautiful needlework. What do you think of that? Have you ever met any one so favoured before? And the work—just look at the work and tell me how it strikes you.” The girl pulled off the bit of muslin from her neck and thrust it at Pinnie, who looked at it confusedly and gasped “Dear, dear, dear!” partly in sympathy, partly as if, in spite of the consideration she owed every one, those were very odd proceedings.

“It’s very badly done; surely you see that,” said Lady Aurora. “It was only a joke.”

“Oh yes, everything’s a joke!” cried the irrepressible invalid—“everything except my state of health; that’s admitted to be serious. When her ladyship sends me five shillings’ worth of coals it’s only a joke; and when she brings me a bottle of the finest port, that’s another; and when she climbs up seventy-seven stairs (there are seventy-seven, I know perfectly, though I never go up or down) to spend the evening with me at the height of the London season, that’s the best of all. I know all about the London season though I never go out, and I appreciate what her ladyship gives up. She’s very jocular indeed, but fortunately I know how to take it. You can see it wouldn’t do for me to be touchy, can’t you, Miss Pynsent?”

“Dear, dear, I should be so glad to make you anything myself; it would be better—it would be better—!” poor Pinnie floundered.

“It would be better than my poor work. I don’t know how to do that sort of thing in the least,” said Lady Aurora.

“I’m sure I didn’t mean that, my lady—I only meant it would be more convenient. Anything in the world she might fancy,” the dressmaker went on as if it were a question of the invalid’s appetite.

“Ah, you see I don’t wear things—only a flannel jacket to be a bit tidy,” Miss Muniment returned. “I go in only for smart counterpanes, as you can see for yourself”; and she spread her white hands complacently over her coverlet of brilliant patchwork. “Now doesn’t that look to you, Miss Pynsent, as if it might be one of her ladyship’s jokes?”

“Oh my good friend, how can you? I never went so far as that!” Lady Aurora interposed with visible anxiety.

“Well, you’ve given me almost everything; I sometimes forget. This only cost me sixpence; so it comes to the same thing as if it had been a present. Yes, only sixpence in a raffle in a bazaar at Hackney, for the benefit of the Wesleyan Chapel three years ago. A young man who works with my brother and lives in that part offered him a couple of tickets; and he took one and I took one. When I say ‘I’ of course I mean he took the two; for how should I find (by which I naturally mean how should he find) a sixpence in that little cup on the chimney-piece unless he had put it there first? Of course my ticket took a prize, and of course, as my bed’s my dwelling-place, the prize was a beautiful counterpane of every colour of the rainbow. Oh there never was such luck as mine!” Rosy chattered, flashing her gay demented eyes at Hyacinth as if to irritate him with her contradictious optimism.

“It’s very lovely, but if you’d like another for a change I’ve got a great many pieces,” Pinnie remarked with a generosity which made the young man feel she was acquitting herself finely.

Rose Muniment laid her little hand on the dressmaker’s arm and responded straight: “No, not a change, not a change. How can there be a change when there’s already everything? There’s everything here—every colour that was ever seen or invented or dreamed of since the world began.” And with her other hand she stroked affectionately her variegated quilt. “You’ve a great many pieces, but you haven’t as many as there are here; and the more you should patch them together the more the whole thing would resemble this dear dazzling old friend. I’ve another idea, very very charming, and perhaps her ladyship can guess what it is.” Rosy kept her fingers on Pinnie’s arm and, smiling, turned her brilliant eyes from one of her female companions to the other as to associate and blend them as closely as possible in their interest in her. “In connexion with what we were talking about a few minutes ago—couldn’t your ladyship just go a little further in the same line?” Then as Lady Aurora looked troubled and embarrassed, blushing at being called upon to answer a conundrum, as it were, so publicly, her infirm friend came to her assistance. “It will surprise you at first, but it won’t when I’ve explained it: my idea is just simply a sweet pink dressing-gown!”

“A sweet pink dressing-gown!” Lady Aurora repeated.

“With a neat black trimming! Don’t you see the connexion with what we were talking of before our good visitors came in?”

“That would be very pretty,” said Pinnie. “I’ve made them like that in my time. Or a carefully-selected blue trimmed with white.”

“No, pink and black, pink and black—to suit my complexion. Perhaps you didn’t know I have a complexion; but there are very few things I lack! Anything at all I should fancy, you were so good as to say. Well now, I fancy that! Your ladyship does see the connexion by this time, doesn’t she?”

Lady Aurora looked distressed, as if she felt she certainly ought to see it but was not sure that even yet it didn’t escape her, and as if at the same time she were struck with the fact that this sudden evocation might result in a strain on the small dressmaker’s resources. “A pink dressing-gown would certainly be very becoming and Miss Pynsent would be very kind,” she said; while Hyacinth made the mental comment that it was a largeish order, since Pinnie would have obviously to furnish the materials as well as the labour. The amiable coolness with which the invalid laid her under contribution was, however, to his sense, quite in character, and he reflected that after all when you were flat on your back like that you had the right to reach out your hands (it wasn’t far you could reach at best) and grab what you could get. Pinnie declared she knew just the article Miss Muniment wanted and that she would undertake to make a perfect duck of it; and Rosy went on to say that she must explain of what use such an article would be, but for this purpose there must be another guess. She would give it to Miss Pynsent and Hyacinth—as many times as they liked: what had she and Lady Aurora been talking about before they came in? She clasped her hands and her eyes shone with her eagerness while she continued to turn them from Lady Aurora to the dressmaker. What would they imagine? What would they think natural, delightful, magnificent—if one could only end at last by making out the right place to put it? Hyacinth suggested successively a cage of Java sparrows, a music-box and a shower-bath—or perhaps even a full-length portrait of her ladyship; and Pinnie looked at him askance in a frightened way, as if perchance he were joking too broadly. Rosy at last relieved their suspense and announced: “A sofa, just a sofa now! What do you say to that? Do you suppose that idea could have come from any one but her ladyship? She must have all the credit of it; she came out with it in the course of conversation. I believe we were talking of the peculiar feeling that comes just under the shoulder-blades if one never has a change. She mentioned it as she might have mentioned just the right sort of rub—there are such wrong sorts!—or another spoonful of that American stuff. We’re thinking it over and one of these days, if we give plenty of time to the question, we shall find the place, the very nicest and snuggest of all and no other. I hope you see the connexion with the pink dressing-gown,” she pursued to Pinnie, “and I hope you see the importance of the question, ‘Shall anything go?’ I should like you to look round a bit and tell me what you would answer if I were to say to you, ‘Can anything go?’”

XV

“I’m sure there’s nothing I should like to part with,” Pinnie returned; and while she surveyed the scene Lady Aurora, with discretion, to lighten Amanda’s responsibility, got up and turned to the window, which was open to the summer evening and admitted still the last rays of the long day. Hyacinth, after a moment, placed himself beside her, looking out with her at the dusky multitude of chimney-pots and the small black houses roofed with grimy tiles. The thick warm air of a London July floated beneath them, suffused with the everlasting uproar of the town, which appeared to have sunk into quietness but again became a mighty voice as soon as one listened for it; here and there, in poor windows, glimmered a turbid light, and high above, in a clearer smokeless zone, a sky still fair and luminous, a faint silver star looked down. The sky was the same that bent far away in the country over golden fields and purple hills and gardens where nightingales sang; but from this point of view everything that covered the earth was ugly and sordid and seemed to express or to represent the weariness of toil. Presently, to Hyacinth’s astonishment, Lady Aurora said to him: “You never came after to get the books.”

“Those you kindly offered to lend me? I didn’t know it was an understanding.”

She gave an uneasy laugh. “I’ve picked them out; they’re quite ready.”

“It’s awfully kind of you,” the young man hastened to say. “I’ll come and get them some day with pleasure.” He wasn’t very sure he would, but it was the least he could profess.

“She’ll tell you where I live, you know,” Lady Aurora went on with a movement of her head in the direction of the bed, as if she were too shy to mention it herself.

“Oh, I’ve no doubt she knows the way—she could tell me every street and every turn!” Hyacinth laughed.

“She has made me describe to her very often how I come and go,” his companion concurred. “I think few people know more about London than she. She never forgets anything.”

“She’s a wonderful little witch—she terrifies me!” he acknowledged.

Lady Aurora turned her modest eyes on him. “Oh, she’s so good, she’s so patient!”

“Yes, and so preternaturally wise and so awfully all there.”

“Ah, she’s immensely clever,” said her ladyship. “Which do you think the cleverer?”

“The cleverer?”

“Of the girl or her brother.”

“Oh, I think he’ll be some day prime minister of England.”

“Do you really? I’m so glad!” she cried with a flush of colour. “I do rejoice if you think that will be possible. You know it ought to be if things were right.”

Hyacinth had not professed this high faith for the purpose of playing on her ladyship’s feelings, but when he felt her intense agreement it was as if he had been making sport of her. Still he said no more than he believed when he observed in a moment that he had the greatest expectations of Paul Muniment’s future: he was sure the world would hear of him, that England would need him, that the public some day would acclaim him. It was impossible to know him without feeling he was very strong and must play some important part.

“Yes, people wouldn’t believe—they wouldn’t believe.” She abounded in his sense and he could measure the good he did her. It was moreover a pleasure to himself to place on record his opinion of his friend; it seemed to make that opinion more clear, to give it the force of an invocation or a prophecy. This was especially the case when he asked why on earth nature had endowed Paul Muniment with such extraordinary powers of mind, and powers of body too—because he was as strong as a horse—if it hadn’t been intended he should do something supreme for his fellow-men. Hyacinth confided to her ladyship that he thought the people in his own class generally very stupid—distinctly what he should call third-rate minds. He wished it hadn’t been so, for heaven knew he felt kindly to them and only asked to cast his lot with theirs; but he was obliged to confess that centuries of poverty, of ill-paid toil, of bad insufficient food and wretched housing hadn’t a favourable effect on the higher faculties. All the more reason that when there was a splendid exception like their friend it should count for a tremendous force—it had so much to make up for, so many to act for. And then Hyacinth repeated that in his own low walk of life people had really not the faculty of thought; their minds had been simplified—reduced to two or three elements. He saw that such judgements made his fellow-guest very uncomfortable; she turned about, she twisted herself vaguely as if she wished to protest, but she was far too considerate to interrupt him. He had no wish to worry her, but there were times when he couldn’t withstand the perverse satisfaction of insisting on his lowliness of station, of turning the knife in the wound inflicted by such explicit reference, and of letting it be seen that if his place in the world was immeasurably small he at least had no illusions about either himself or his species. Lady Aurora replied as quickly as possible that she knew a great deal about the poor—not the poor after the fashion of Rosy, but the terribly, hopelessly poor, with whom she was more familiar than Hyacinth would perhaps believe—and that she was often struck with their great talents and their quick wit, with their command of conversation really of much more interest to her than most of what one usually heard in drawing-rooms. She often found them immensely clever.