Hyacinth waited a long time, but when at last Millicent came to the
door the splendour of her appearance did much to justify her delay.
He heard an immense rustling on the staircase, accompanied by a
creaking of that inexpensive structure, and then she brushed forward
into the narrow, dusky passage where he had been standing a quarter
of an hour. Highly flushed, she exhaled a strong, cheap perfume, and
she instantly thrust her muff, a tight, fat, beribboned receptacle,
at him to be held while she adjusted her gloves to her large, vulgar
hands. He opened the door—it was so natural an assumption that they
shouldn’t be able to talk properly in the passage—and they came out to
the low steps, lingering there in the yellow Sunday sunshine. A loud
ejaculation on the beauty of the day broke from Millicent, though, as
we know, she was not addicted to facile admirations. Winter was not
over but spring had begun, and the smoky London air allowed the baffled
vision, by way of a change, to pierce it almost through. The town could
refresh its recollections of the sky, and the sky could ascertain
the geographical position of the town. The essential dimness of the
low perspectives had by no means disappeared, but it had loosened its
folds; it lingered as a blur of mist interwoven with pretty sun-tints
and faint transparencies. There was warmth and iridescence and a view
of the shutters of shops, and the church-bells were ringing. Miss
Henning remarked that it was a “shime” she couldn’t have a place to
ask a gentleman to sit down; but what were you to do when you had such
a grind for your living and a room, to keep yourself tidy, no bigger
than a pill-box? She couldn’t herself abide waiting outside; she knew
something about it when she took things home to ladies to choose—the
time they spent was long enough to choose a husband!—and it always made
her feel quite wicked. It was something “croo’l.” If she could have
what she liked she knew what she’d have; and she hinted at a mystic
bower where a visitor could sit and enjoy himself—with the morning
paper or a nice view out of the window or even a glass of sherry—so
that, close at hand but perfectly private, she could dress without
getting in a fidget, which always made her red in the face.
“I don’t know how I _’ave_ pitched on my things,” she remarked as she
offered her magnificence to Hyacinth, who became aware she had put a
small plump book into her muff. He explained that, the day being so
fine, he had come to propose to her a walk in the manner of ancient
times. They might spend an hour or two in the Park and stroll beside
the Serpentine, or even paddle about on it if she liked; they might
watch the lambkins or feed the ducks if she would put a crust in her
pocket. The privilege of paddling Millicent entirely declined; she had
no idea of wetting her flounces and she left those rough pleasures,
especially of a Sunday, to a lower class of young woman. But she didn’t
mind if she did go a turn, though he didn’t deserve any such favour
after the way he hadn’t been near her, not if she had died in her
garret. She wasn’t one that was to be dropped and taken up at any man’s
convenience—she didn’t keep one of those offices for servants out of
place. Her conviction was strong that if the day hadn’t been so grand
she would have sent her friend about his business; it was lucky for him
she was always forgiving—such was her sensitive, generous nature—when
the sun was out. Only there was one thing—she couldn’t abide making no
difference for Sunday; it was her personal habit to go to church and
she should have it on her conscience if she gave that up for a lark.
Hyacinth had already been impressed, more than once, by the manner in
which his old playmate stickled for the religious observance: of all
the queer disparities of her nature her devotional turn struck him
as perhaps the queerest. She held her head erect through the longest
and dullest sermon and quitted the sacred edifice with her fine face
embellished by the publicity of her virtue. She was exasperated by
the general secularity of Hyacinth’s behaviour, especially taken in
conjunction with his general straightness, and was only consoled a
little by the fact that if he didn’t drink or fight or steal he at
least dabbled in unlimited wickedness of opinion—theories as bad as
anything people often got ten years for. He had not yet revealed to
her that his theories had somehow lately come to be held with less of
a clutch; an instinct of kindness had forbidden him to deprive her of a
grievance doing so much for sociability. He had not reflected that she
would have been more aggrieved, and consequently more delightful, if
her condemnation of his godlessness had missed corroborative signs.
On the present occasion she let him know he might have his pleasure
if he would first accompany her to church; and it was in vain he
represented to her that this proceeding would deprive them of their
morning, inasmuch as after church she would have to dine and in the
interval there would be no time left. She replied with a toss of
her head that she dined when she liked; besides, on Sundays she had
cold fare—it was left out for her: an argument to which Hyacinth had
to assent, his ignorance of her domestic economy being complete,
thanks to the maidenly mystery, the vagueness of reference and
explanation in which, despite great freedom of complaint, perpetual
announcements of intended change, of impending promotion and of high
bids for her services in other quarters, she had always enshrouded
her private affairs. He walked by her side to the place of worship
she preferred—her choice was made apparently from a large experience;
and as they went he observed that it was a good job he wasn’t married
to her. Lord, how she would bully him, how she would “squeeze” him,
in such a case! The worst of it would be that—such was his amiable,
peace-loving nature—he should obey like a showman’s poodle. And pray
who _was_ a man to obey, asked Millicent, if he wasn’t to obey his own
wife? She sat up in her pew with a majesty that carried out this idea;
she seemed to answer in her proper person for creeds and communions and
sacraments; she was more than devotional, she was individually almost
pontifical. Hyacinth had never felt himself under such distinguished
protection; the Princess Casamassima came back to him in comparison as
a loose Bohemian, a shabby adventuress. He had sought her out to-day
not for the sake of her austerity—he had had too gloomy a week for
that—but for that of her genial side; yet now that she treated him
to the severer spectacle it struck him for the moment as really grand
sport, a kind of magnification of her rich vitality. She had her phases
and caprices like the Princess herself, and if they were not the same
as those of the lady of Madeira Crescent they proved at least that
she was as brave a woman. No one but a really big creature could give
herself such airs; she would have a consciousness of the large reserve
of pliancy required to make up for them. The Princess wanted to destroy
society and Millicent to uphold it; and as Hyacinth, by the side of his
childhood’s friend, listened to practised intonings and felt the brush
of a rich unction, he was obliged to recognise the liberality of a fate
that had sometimes appeared invidious. He had been provided with the
best opportunities for choosing between the beauty of the original and
the beauty of the conventional.
On this particular Sunday there was by luck no sermon—by the luck,
I mean, of his heretical impatience—so that after the congregation
dispersed there was still plenty of time for a walk in the Park. Our
friends traversed that barely-interrupted expanse of irrepressible
herbage which stretches from the Birdcage Walk to Hyde Park Corner
and took their way to Kensington Gardens beside the Serpentine. Once
her religious exercises were over for the day—she as rigidly forbore
to repeat them in the afternoon as she made a point of the first
service—once she had lifted her voice in prayer and praise Millicent
changed her carriage; moving to a different measure, uttering her
sentiments in a high, free manner and not minding if it was noticed
she had on her very best gown and was out if need be for the day.
She was mainly engaged at first in overhauling Hyacinth for his long
absence and demanding as usual some account of what he had been up to.
He listened at his ease, liking and enjoying her chaff, which seemed
to him, oddly enough, wholesome and refreshing, and amusedly and
absolutely declining to satisfy her. He alleged, as he had had occasion
to do before, that if he asked no explanations of her the least he had
a right to expect in return was that she should let him off as easily;
and even the indignation with which she received this plea didn’t make
him feel that a clearing-up between them could be a serious thing.
There was nothing to clear up and nothing to forgive; they were a pair
of very fallible creatures, united much more by their weaknesses than
by any consistency or fidelity they might pretend to practise toward
each other. It was an old acquaintance—the oldest thing to-day, except
Mr. Vetch’s friendship, in Hyacinth’s life; and, oddly enough, it
inspired our young man with a positive indulgent piety. The probability
that the girl “kept company” with other men had quite ceased to torment
his imagination; it was no longer necessary to his happiness to be so
certain about it that he might dismiss her from his mind. He could be
as happy without it as with it, and he felt a new modesty over prying
into her affairs. He was so little in a position to be stern with her
that her assumption of his recognising a right in her to pull him to
pieces seemed but a part of her perpetual clumsiness—a clumsiness that
was not soothing, yet was nevertheless, in its rich spontaneity, one of
the things he liked her for.
“If you’ve come to see me only to make low jokes at my expense you had
better have stayed away altogether,” she said with dignity as they came
out of the Green Park. “In the first place it’s rude, in the second
place it’s silly, and in the third place I see through you.”
“My dear Milly, the motions you go through, the resentment you profess,
are all a kicking up of dust which I blow away with a breath,” her
companion replied. “But it doesn’t matter; go on—say anything you
like. I came to see you for recreation, to enjoy myself without effort
of my own. I scarcely ventured to hope, however, that you’d make me
laugh—I’ve been so dismal for a long time. In fact I’m dismal still. I
wish I had your disposition. My mirth, as you see, is a bit feverish.”
“The first thing I require of any friend is that he should respect
me,” Miss Henning announced. “You lead a bad life. I know what to think
about that,” she continued irrelevantly.
“And is it through respect for _you_ that you wish me to lead a
better one? To-day then is so much saved out of my wickedness. Let us
get on the grass,” Hyacinth pursued; “it’s innocent and pastoral to
feel it under one’s feet. It’s jolly to be with you. You understand
everything.”
“I don’t understand everything you say, but I understand everything
you hide,” the young woman returned as the great central expanse of
the Park, looking intensely green and browsable, stretched away before
them.
“Then I shall soon become a mystery to you, for I mean from this time
forth to cease to seek safety in concealment. You’ll know nothing about
me then—for it will be all under your nose.”
“Well, there’s nothing so pretty as nature,” Millicent observed at a
venture, surveying the smutty sheep who find pasturage in the fields
that extend from Knightsbridge to the Bayswater Road. “What will you do
when you’re so bad you can’t go to the shop?” she added with a sudden
transition. And when he asked why he should ever be so bad as that
she said she could see he _was_ in a fever: she hadn’t noticed it at
first because he never had had any more complexion than a cheese. Was
it something he had caught in some of those back slums where he went
prying about with his mad ideas? It served him right for taking as
little good into such places as ever came out of them. Would his fine
friends—a precious lot _they_ were, that put it off on him to do all
the nasty part—would they find the doctor and the port wine and the
money and all the rest when he was laid up, perhaps for months, through
their putting such rot into his head and his putting it into others
that could carry it even less? She stopped on the grass in the watery
sunshine and bent on her companion a pair of eyes in which he noted
afresh a stirred curiosity, a friendly, reckless ray, a possibility of
ardour, a pledge of really closer comradeship. Suddenly she brought
out, quitting the tone of exaggerated derision she had employed a
moment before: “You precious little rascal, you’ve got something on
your heart! Has your Princess given you the sack?”
“My poor girl, your talk’s a queer mixture,” he resignedly sighed. “But
it may well be. It’s not queerer than my life.”
“Well, I’m glad you admit that!” Milly cried as she walked on with a
flutter of ribbons.
“Your ideas about my ideas!” Hyacinth wailed. “Yes, you should see me
in the back slums. I’m a bigger Philistine than you, Miss Henning.”
“You’ve got more ridiculous names, if that’s what you mean. I don’t
believe you half the time know what you do mean yourself. I don’t
believe you even know with all your thinking what you do think. That’s
your disease.”
“It’s astonishing how you sometimes put your finger on the place,”
he now returned with interest. “I mean to think no more—I mean to
give it up. Avoid it yourself, dear friend—avoid it as you would a
baleful vice. It confers no true happiness. Let us live in the world of
irreflective contemplation—let us live in the present hour.”
“I don’t care how I live nor where I live,” she cried, “so long as I
can do as I like. It’s them that are over you—it’s them that cut it
fine! But you never were really satisfactory to me—not as one friend
should be to another,” she pursued, reverting irresistibly to the
concrete and turning still upon her companion that fine fairness which
had no cause to shrink from a daylight exhibition. “Do you remember
that day I came back to the Plice, ever so long ago, and called on
poor dear Miss Pynsent—she couldn’t abide me, she never understood
my form—and waited till you came in, and then went a walk with you
and had tea at a coffee-shop? Well, I don’t mind telling you that you
weren’t satisfactory to me even that night, and that I consider myself
remarkably good-natured, ever since, to have kept you so little up to
the mark. You always tried to carry it off as if you were telling one
everything, and you never told one nothing at all.”
“What is it you want me to tell, my dear child?” Hyacinth freely
fluted, putting his hand into her arm. “I’ll tell you anything in life
you like.”
“I daresay you’ll tell me no end of rot. Certainly I tried kindness on
you,” Miss Henning declared.
“Try it again; don’t give it up,” said her friend while he moved with
her in close association.
She stopped short, detaching herself, though not with intention. “Well
then, _has_ she clean chucked you?”
Hyacinth’s eyes turned away; he looked at the green expanse, misty and
sunny, dotted with Sunday-keeping figures which made it seem larger; at
the wooded boundary of the Park, beyond the grassy moat of the Gardens;
at a shining reach of the Serpentine on the one side and the far
façades of Bayswater, brightened by the fine weather and the privilege
of their view, on the other. “Well, you know, I rather fancy it,” he
replied in a moment.
“Ah the vile brute!” she rang out as they resumed their walk.
Upwards of an hour later they were sitting under the great trees of
Kensington, those scattered, in the Gardens, over the slope which
rises gently from the side of the water most distant from the old red
palace. They had taken possession of a couple of the chairs placed
there to the convenience of that superior part of the public for which
a penny is not prohibitive, and Millicent, of whom such speculations
were highly characteristic, had devoted considerable conjecture to the
question of whether the functionary charged with collecting the penny
would omit to come and demand his fee. Miss Henning liked to enjoy
her pleasures _gratis_ as well as to see others do so, and even that
of sitting in a penny chair could touch her more deeply in proportion
as she might feel she was “doing” some vested interest by it. The man
came round, however, and after that her pleasure could only take the
form of sitting as long as possible, to recover her money. This issue
had been met, and two or three others of a much weightier kind had
come up. At the moment we again participate in them she was leaning
forward, earnest and attentive, her hands clasped in her lap and her
multitudinous silver bracelets tumbled forward on her thick wrists.
Her face, with its parted lips and eyes clouded to gentleness, wore an
expression Hyacinth had never seen there before and which caused him to
say to her: “After all, dear Milly, you’re a sweet old boy!”
“Why did you never tell me before—years ago?” she asked.
“It’s always soon enough to make a fool of one’s self! I don’t know why
I’ve slobbered over to-day—sitting here in a charming place, in balmy
air, amid pleasing suggestions and without any reason or practical end.
The story’s hideous and I’ve kept it down so long! It would have been
an effort to me, an impossible effort at any time, to do otherwise.
Somehow, just now it hasn’t been an effort; and indeed I’ve spoken
just _because_ the air’s sweet and the place ornamental and the day
a holiday and your person so lovely and your presence so moving. All
this has had the effect an object has if you plunge it into a cup of
water—the water overflows. Only in my case it’s not water, but a very
foul liquid indeed. Pardon the bad odour!”
There had been a flush of excitement in Millicent’s face while she
listened to what had gone before; it lingered, and as a fine colour
still further refined by an access of sensibility is never unbecoming
to a handsome woman it enriched her unwonted expression. “I wouldn’t
have been so rough with you,” she presently remarked.
“My dear lass, _this_ isn’t rough!” Hyacinth protested.
“You’re all of a tremble.” She put out her hand and laid it on his own
as if she had been a nurse feeling his pulse.
“Very likely. I’m a nervous little beast,” he said.
“Any one would be nervous to think of anything so awful. And when it’s
yourself!” The girl’s manner represented the dreadfulness of such a
contingency. “You require sympathy,” she added in a tone that made him
perversely grin; the words sounded like a medical prescription.
“A tablespoonful every half-hour.” And he kept her hand, which she was
about to draw away.
“You’d have been nicer too,” Millicent went on.
“How do you mean, I’d have been nicer?”
“Well, I like you now,” said Miss Henning. And this time she drew away
her hand as if, after such a speech, to recover her dignity.
“It’s a pity I’ve always been so terribly under the influence of
women,” Hyacinth sighed again as he folded his arms.
He was surprised at the delicacy with which she replied. “You must
remember they’ve a great deal to make up to you.”
“Do you mean for my mother? Ah _she_’d have made it up if they had let
her! But the sex in general have been very nice to me,” he declared.
“It’s wonderful the kindness they’ve shown me and the amount of
pleasure I’ve derived from their society.”
It would perhaps be inquiring too closely to consider whether this
reference to sources of consolation other than those that sprang from
her own bosom had an irritating effect on Milly; she at all events
answered it by presently saying: “Does _she_ know—your trumpery
Princess?”
“Yes, but she doesn’t mind it.”
“That’s most uncommonly kind of her!” cried the girl with a scornful
laugh.
“It annoys me very much,” he interposed—though still with
detachment—“to hear you apply invidious epithets to her. You know
nothing about her.”
“How do you know what I know, please?” She asked this question with
the habit of her natural pugnacity, but the next instant she dropped
her voice as in remembrance of the appeal made by a great misfortune.
“Hasn’t she treated you most shamefully, and you such a regular dear?”
“Not in the least. It is I who, as you may say, have rounded on her.
She made my acquaintance because I was interested in the same things as
herself. Her interest has continued, has increased, but mine, for some
reason or other, has declined. She has been consistent and I’ve been
beastly fickle.”
“Your interest in the Princess has declined?” Millicent questioned,
following imperfectly this somewhat complicated statement.
“Oh dear, no. I mean only in some opinions I used to hold.” And he
might have been speaking of “shaky” shares, to a considerable amount,
of which he had at a given moment shrewdly directed his broker to
relieve him.
“Ay, when you thought everything should go to the lowest! That’s a good
job!”—and Miss Henning’s laugh suggested that, after all, Hyacinth’s
views and the changes in his views were not what was most important.
“And your grand lady still goes in for the costermongers?”
“She wants to take hold of the great question of material misery; she
wants to do something to make that misery less. I don’t care for her
means, I don’t like her processes. But when I think of what there is to
be done, and of the courage and devotion of those who set themselves to
do it, it seems to me sometimes that with my reserves and scruples I’m
a very poor creature.”
“You _are_ a poor creature—to sit there and put such accusations on
yourself!” the girl flashed out. “If you haven’t a spirit for yourself
I promise I’ve got one for you! If she hasn’t kicked you out why in the
name of common sense did you say just now she has? And why is your dear
old face as white as my stocking?”
Hyacinth looked at her a while without answering and as if he took a
placid pleasure in her violence. “I don’t know—I don’t understand.”
She put out her own hand now and took possession of his; for a minute
she held it as wishing to check herself, as finding some influence in
his touch that would help her. They sat in silence, looking at the
ornamental water and the landscape-gardening reflected in it, till
Milly turned her eyes again and brought out: “Well, that’s the way I’d
have served him too!”
It took him a moment to perceive she was alluding to the vengeance
wrought on Lord Frederick. “Don’t speak of that; you’ll never again
hear a word about it on my lips. It’s all darkness.”
“I always knew you were a gentleman,” the girl went on with assurance.
“A queer variety, _cara mia_,” her companion rejoined—not very
candidly, as we know the theories he himself had cultivated on this
point. “Of course you had heard poor Pinnie’s wild maunderings. They
used to exasperate me when she was alive, but I forgive her now. It’s
time I should, when I begin to talk myself. I think I’m breaking up.”
“Oh it wasn’t Miss Pynsent; it was just yourself.”
“Pray what did I ever say—in those days?”
“It wasn’t what you said,” she answered with refinement. “I guessed
the whole business—except of course what she got her time for and you
being taken to that death-bed—the very day I came back to the Plice.
Couldn’t you see I was turning it over? And did I ever throw it up at
you, whatever high words we might have had? Therefore what I say now is
no more than I thought then. It only makes you nicer.”
She was crude, she was common, she even had the vice of pointless
exaggeration, for he himself honestly couldn’t understand how the
situation he had described could make him nicer. But when the faculty
of affection that was in her rose to the surface it diffused a glow of
rest, almost of protection, deepening at any rate the luxury of their
small cheap pastoral, the interlude in the grind of the week’s work; so
that though neither of them had dined he would have been delighted to
sit with her there the whole afternoon. It seemed a pause in something
harsh that was happening to him, making it all easier, pushing it off
to a distance. His thoughts hovered about that with a pertinacity of
which they themselves wearied, but they hung there now with an ache of
indifference. It would be too much, no doubt, to say that Millicent’s
society appeared a compensation, yet he felt it at least a resource.
For her too, evidently, the time had a taste; she made no proposal to
retrace their steps. She questioned him about his father’s family and
as to their letting him go on like that without ever holding out so
much as a little finger; and she declared in a manner that was meant
to gratify him by the indignation it conveyed, though the awkwardness
of the turn made him smile, that if she had been one of such a bloated
crew she should never have been able to “abear” the thought of a
relation in such a poor way. Hyacinth already knew what Miss Henning
thought of his business at old Crook’s and of the feeble show of a
young man of his parts contented with a career that was after all a
mere getting of one’s living by one’s ’ands. He had to do with books,
but so had any shop-boy who should carry such articles to the residence
of purchasers; and plainly Millicent had never discovered wherein the
art he practised differed from that of a plumber or a saddler. He had
not forgotten the shock once administered to her by his letting her
know he wore an apron; she looked down on such conditions from her own
so much higher range, since _she_ wore mantles and jackets and shawls
and the long trains of robes exhibited behind plate glass on dummies
of wire and drawn forth to be transferred to her own undulating person,
and had moreover never a scrap to do with making them up, but just with
talking about them and showing them off and persuading people—people
too quite gaping with the impression—of their beauty and cheapness. It
had been a source of endless comfort to her, in her arduous evolution,
that she herself never worked with her ’ands. Hyacinth answered her
inquiries, as she had answered his own of old, by asking her what “his
family” owed to the son of a person who had brought murder and mourning
into their bright sublimities, and whether she thought he was very
highly recommended to them. His question pulled her up a moment; after
which she returned with the finest spirit: “Well, if your position
was so low ain’t that all the more reason they should give you a lift?
Oh it’s something cruel!” she cried; and she added that in his place
she would have found a way to bring herself under their notice. _She_
wouldn’t have drudged out her life in Soho if she had had the blood
of half the Peerage in her veins! “If they had noticed you they’d
have liked you,” she was so good as to observe; but she immediately
remembered also that in that case he would have been carried away quite
over her head. She wasn’t prepared to say that she would have given
him up, little good as she had ever got of him. In that case he would
have been thick with real swells, and she emphasised the “real” by way
of a thrust at the fine lady of Madeira Crescent—an artifice wasted,
however, inasmuch as Hyacinth was sure she had extracted from Sholto
a tolerably detailed history of the Princess. Millicent was tender and
tenderly sportive, and he was struck with the fact that his base birth
really made little impression on her: she accounted it an accident much
less grave than he had been in the habit of doing. She was touched
and moved, but what moved her was his story of his mother’s dreadful
revenge, her long imprisonment and his childish visit to the jail,
with his later discovery of his peculiar footing in the world. These
things produced in her a generous agitation—something the same in kind
as the emotion she had occasionally owed to the perusal of the _Family
Herald_. What affected her most and what she came back to was the whole
element of Lord Frederick and the mystery of Hyacinth’s having got so
little good out of his affiliation to that nobleman. She couldn’t get
over his friends’ not having done something, though her imagination
was still vague as to what they might have done. It was the queerest
thing in the world to find her apparently assuming that if he hadn’t
been so inefficient he might have “worked” the whole dark episode as a
source of distinction, of glory, of profit. _She_ wouldn’t have been a
nobleman’s daughter for nothing! Oh the left hand was as good as the
right; her respectability, for the moment, made nothing of that! His
long silence was what most astonished her; it put her out of patience,
and there was a strange candour in her wonderment at his not having
bragged about his ancestry. The generations representing it were vivid
and concrete to her now in comparison with the timid shadows Pinnie had
set into spasmodic circulation. Millicent bumped about in his hushed
past with the oddest mixture of enthusiasm and criticism, and with good
intentions which had the effect of profane voices bawling for sacred
echoes.
“Me only—me and her? Certainly I ought to be obliged, even though it’s
late in the day. The first time you saw her I suppose you told her—that
night you went into her box at the theatre, eh? She’d have worse to
tell you, I’m sure, if she could ever bring herself to speak the proper
truth. And do you mean to say you never broke it to your big friend in
the chemical line?”
“No, we’ve never talked about it.”
“Men are rare creatures!” Millicent cried. “You never so much as
mentioned it?”
“It wasn’t necessary. He knew it otherwise—he knew it through his
sister.”
“How do you know that if he never spoke?”
“Oh because he was jolly good to me,” said Hyacinth.
“Well, I don’t suppose that ruined him,” Miss Henning rejoined. “And
how did his sister know it?”
“Oh I don’t know. She guessed it.”
The girl stared, then fairly snorted. “It was none of her business.”
Then she added: “He _was_ jolly good to you? Ain’t he good to you now?”
She asked this question in her loud free voice, which rang through the
bright stillness of the place.
Hyacinth delayed for a minute to meet it, and when at last he did so it
was without looking at her. “I don’t know. I can’t make it out.”
“Well, I can then!” And she jerked him round toward her and inspected
him with her big bright eyes. “You silly baby, has _he_ been serving
you?” She pressed her curiosity upon him; she asked if that was what
disagreed with him. His lips gave her no answer, but apparently after
an instant she found one in his face. “Has he been making up to her
Serene Highness—is that his game?” she broke out. “Do you mean to say
she’d look at the likes of him?”
“The likes of him? He’s as fine a man as stands!” said Hyacinth.
“They’ve the same views, they’re doing the same work.”
“Oh he hasn’t changed _his_ opinions then—not like you?”
“No, he knows what he wants; he knows what he thinks.”
“Very much the ‘same work,’ I’ll be bound!” cried Millicent in large
derision. “He knows what he wants, and I daresay he’ll get it.”
He was now on his feet, turning away from her; but she also rose and
passed her hand into his arm. “It’s their own business; they can do as
they please.”
“Oh don’t try to be a blamed saint; you put me out of patience!” the
girl responded with characteristic energy. “They’re a precious pair,
and it would do me good to hear you say so.”
“A man shouldn’t turn against his friends,” he went on with desperate
sententiousness.
“That’s for them to remember; there’s no danger of _your_ forgetting
it.” They had begun to walk but she stopped him; she was suddenly
smiling at him and her face was radiant. She went on with caressing
inconsequence: “All you’ve terribly told me—it _has_ made you nicer.”
“I don’t see that, but it has certainly made _you_ so. My dear girl,
you’re a comfort,” Hyacinth added as they moved further. Soon after
which, the protection offered by the bole of a great tree being
sufficiently convenient, he had, on a large look about them, passed his
arm round her and drawn her closer and closer—so close that as they
again paused together he felt her yield with a fine firmness, as it
were, and with the full mass of her interest.