IV

“Well, you’ll have to guess my name before I’ll tell you,” the girl

said with a free laugh, pushing her way into the narrow hall and

leaning against the tattered wall-paper which, representing blocks of

marble with bevelled edges, in streaks and speckles of black and grey,

had not been renewed for years and came back to her out of the past. As

Miss Pynsent closed the door, seeing her visitor so resolute, the light

filtered in from the street through the narrow dusty glass above, and

then the very smell and sense of the place returned to Millicent: the

impression of a musty dimness with a small steep staircase at the end,

covered with the very strip of oilcloth she could recognise and made

a little less dark by a window in the turn (you could see it from the

hall) where you might almost bump your head against the house behind.

Nothing was changed but Miss Pynsent and of course the girl herself.

She had noticed outside how the sign between the windows had not even

been touched up; there was still the same preposterous announcement

of “fashionable bonnets”—as if the poor little dressmaker had the

slightest acquaintance with that style of head-dress, of which Miss

Henning’s own knowledge was now so complete. She could see this artist

was looking at her hat, a wonderful composition of flowers and ribbons;

her eyes had travelled up and down Millicent’s whole person, but they

rested in fascination on that grandest ornament. The girl had forgotten

how small the dressmaker was; she barely came up to her shoulder. She

had lost her hair and wore a cap which Millicent noticed in return,

wondering if it were a specimen of what she thought the fashion. Miss

Pynsent stared up at her as if she had been six feet high; but she was

used to that sort of surprised admiration, being perfectly conscious

she was a magnificent young woman.

“Won’t you take me into your shop?” she asked. “I don’t want to order

anything; I only want to inquire after your ’ealth. Isn’t this rather

an awkward place to talk?” She made her way further in without waiting

for permission, seeing that her startled hostess had not yet guessed.

“The show-room’s on the right hand,” said Miss Pynsent with her

professional manner, which was intended evidently to mark a difference.

She spoke as if on the other side, where the horizon was bounded by

the partition of the next house, there were labyrinths of apartments.

Passing in after her guest she found the young lady already spread out

upon the sofa, the everlasting sofa in the right-hand corner as you

faced the window, a piece of furniture covered with a tight shrunken

shroud of strange yellow stuff, the tinge of which revealed years of

washing, and surmounted by a coloured print of Rebekah at the Well,

balancing, in the opposite quarter, against a portrait of the Empress

of the French taken from an illustrated newspaper and framed and glazed

in the manner of 1853. Millicent looked about, asking herself what Miss

Pynsent had to show and acting perfectly the part of the most brilliant

figure the place had ever contained. The old implements were there on

the table: the pincushions and needle-books, the pink measuring-tape

with which, as children, she and Hyacinth used to take each other’s

height; and the same collection of fashion-plates (she could see in a

minute) crumpled, sallow and fly-blown. The little dressmaker bristled,

as she used to do, with needles and pins stuck all over the front of

her dress—they might almost have figured the stiff sparse fur of a

sick animal; but there were no rustling fabrics tossed in heaps over

the room—nothing but the skirt of a shabby dress (it might have been

her own) which she was evidently repairing and had flung upon the

table when she came to the door. Miss Henning speedily arrived at the

conclusion that her old friend’s business had not increased, and felt

some safe luxurious scorn of a person who knew so little what was to

be got out of London. It was Millicent’s belief that she herself was

already perfectly acquainted with the resources of the capital.

“Now tell me, how’s old Hyacinth? I should like so much to see him,”

she remarked while she extended a pair of large protrusive feet and

supported herself on the sofa by her hands.

“Old Hyacinth?” Miss Pynsent repeated with majestic blankness and as if

she had never heard of such a person. She felt the girl to be cruelly,

scathingly well dressed and couldn’t imagine who she was nor with what

design she might have presented herself.

“Perhaps you call him Mr. Robinson to-day—you always wanted him to hold

himself so high. But to his face at any rate I’ll call him as I used

to: you just see if I don’t!”

“Bless my soul, you must be the awful little ’Enning!” Miss Pynsent

exclaimed, planted before her and going now into every detail.

“Well, I’m glad you’ve made up your mind. I thought you’d know me

directly and I daresay I _was_ awful. But I ain’t so bad now, hey?”

the young woman went on with confidence. “I had a call to make in this

part, and it came into my ’ead to look you up. I don’t like to lose

sight of old friends.”

“I never knew you—you’ve improved as I couldn’t have believed,”

Miss Pynsent returned with a candour justified by her age and her

consciousness of respectability.

“Well, _you_ haven’t changed; you were always calling me something

horrid.”

“I daresay it doesn’t matter to you now, does it?” said the dressmaker,

seating herself but quite unable to take up her work, blank as she was

before the greatness of her visitor.

“Oh, I’m all right now,” Miss Henning declared with the air of one who

had nothing to fear from human judgements.

“You were a pretty child—I never said the contrary to that; but I

had no idea you’d turn out like this. You’re too tall for a woman,”

Miss Pynsent added, much divided between an old prejudice and a new

appreciation.

“Well, I enjoy beautiful ’ealth,” said the young lady; “every one

thinks I’m at least twenty-two.” She spoke with a certain artless pride

in her bigness and her bloom and as if, to show her development, she

would have taken off her jacket or let you feel her upper arm. She was

certainly handsome, with a shining, bold, good-natured eye, a fine,

free, physiognomic oval, an abundance of brown hair and a smile that

fairly flaunted the whiteness of her teeth. Her head was set on a fair

strong neck and her robust young figure was rich in feminine curves.

Her gloves, covering her wrists insufficiently, showed the redness

of those parts in the interstices of the numerous silver bracelets

that encircled them, and Miss Pynsent made the observation that her

hands were not more delicate than her feet. She was not graceful, and

even the little dressmaker, whose preference for distinguished forms

never deserted her, indulged in the mental reflexion that she was

common, despite her magnificence; but there was something about her

indescribably fresh, successful and satisfying. She was to her blunt,

expanded finger-tips a daughter of London, of the crowded streets

and bustling traffic of the great city; she had drawn her health and

strength from its dingy courts and foggy thoroughfares and peopled

its parks and squares and crescents with her ambitions; it had entered

into her blood and her bone, the sound of her voice and the carriage

of her head; she understood it by instinct and loved it with passion;

she represented its immense vulgarities and curiosities, its brutality

and its knowingness, its good-nature and its impudence, and might

have figured, in an allegorical procession, as a kind of glorified

townswoman, a nymph of the wilderness of Middlesex, a flower of the

clustered parishes, the genius of urban civilisation, the muse of

cockneyism. The restrictions under which Miss Pynsent regarded her

would have cost the dressmaker some fewer scruples if she had guessed

the impression she herself made on Millicent, and how the whole place

seemed to that prosperous young lady to smell of poverty and failure.

Her childish image of its mistress had shown her as neat, fine,

superior, with round loops of hair fastened on the temples by combs

and associations of brilliancy arising from the constant manipulation

of precious stuffs—tissues at least that Millicent regarded with envy.

But the little woman before her was bald and white and pinched; she

looked shrunken and sickly and insufficiently nourished; her small

eyes were sharp and suspicious and her hideous cap didn’t disguise the

way everything had gone. Miss Henning thanked her stars, as she had

often done before, that she hadn’t been obliged to get _her_ living by

drudging over needlework year after year in that undiscoverable street,

in a dismal little room where nothing had been changed for ages; the

absence of change had such an exasperating effect upon her vigorous

young nature. She reflected with complacency on her good fortune in

being attached to a more exciting, a more dramatic department of the

great drapery interest, and noticed that though it was already November

there was no fire in the neatly-kept grate beneath the chimney-piece,

on which a design, partly architectural, partly botanical, executed

in the hair of Miss Pynsent’s parents, was flanked by a pair of vases,

under glass, containing muslin flowers.

If she thought that lady’s eyes suspicious it must be confessed that

her hostess felt much on her guard in presence of so unexpected and

undesired a reminder of one of the least honourable episodes in the

annals of Lomax Place. Miss Pynsent esteemed people in proportion

to their success in constituting a family circle—in cases, that is,

when the materials were under their hand. This success, among the

various members of the house of Henning, had been of the scantiest,

and the domestic broils in the establishment adjacent to her own,

the vicissitudes of which she was able to follow, as she sat near her

window at work, by simply inclining an ear to the thin partition behind

her—these scenes, rendering the crash of crockery and the imprecations

of the wounded frequently and peculiarly audible, had long been the

scandal of a humble but harmonious neighbourhood. Mr. Henning was

supposed to fill a place of confidence in a brush factory, while his

wife, at home, occupied herself with the washing and mending of a

considerable brood, mainly of sons. But economy and sobriety and indeed

a virtue more important still had never presided at their councils. The

freedom and frequency of Mrs. Henning’s relations with a stove-polisher

off the Euston Road were at least not a secret to a person who lived

next door and looked up from her work so often that it was a wonder

it was always finished so quickly. The little Hennings, unwashed

and unchidden, spent most of their time either in pushing each other

into the gutter or in running to the public-house at the corner for a

pennyworth of gin, and the borrowing propensities of their elders were

a theme for exclamation. There was no object of personal or domestic

use which Mrs. Henning had not at one time or another endeavoured to

elicit from the dressmaker; beginning with a mattress, on an occasion

when she was about to take to her bed for a considerable period, and

ending with a flannel petticoat and a pewter teapot. Lomax Place had

eventually, from its over-peeping windows and doorways, been present

at the seizure, by a long-suffering landlord, of the chattels of this

interesting race and at the ejectment of the whole insolvent group, who

departed in a straggling, jeering, unabashed, cynical manner, carrying

with them but little of the sympathy of the street. Millicent, whose

childish intimacy with Hyacinth Robinson Miss Pynsent had always viewed

with vague anxiety—she thought the girl a nasty little thing and was

afraid she would teach the innocent orphan low ways—Millicent, with

her luxuriant tresses, her precocious beauty, her staring, mocking

manner on the doorstep, was at this time twelve years of age. She

vanished with her vanishing companions; Lomax Place saw them double

the cape, that is turn the corner, and returned to its occupations

with a conviction that they would make shipwreck on the outer reefs.

But neither spar nor splinter floated back to their former haunts,

and they were engulfed altogether in the fathomless deeps of the town.

Miss Pynsent drew a long breath; it was her judgement that none of them

would come to any good whatever, and Millicent least of all.

When therefore this young lady reappeared with all the signs of

accomplished survival she couldn’t fail to ask herself whether, under

a specious seeming, the phenomenon didn’t simply represent the triumph

of vice. She was alarmed, but she would have given her silver thimble

to know the girl’s history, and between her shock and her curiosity she

passed an uncomfortable half-hour. She felt the familiar mysterious

creature to be playing with her; revenging herself for former

animadversions, for having been snubbed and miscalled by a prying

little spinster who could now make no figure beside her. If it was not

the triumph of vice it was at least the triumph of impertinence, as

well as of youth, health and a greater acquaintance with the art of

dress than Miss Pynsent could boast, for all her ridiculous signboards.

She perceived, or she believed she perceived, that Millicent wanted

to scare her, to make her think she had come after Hyacinth, that she

wished to get hold of him and somehow mislead and tempt him. I should

be sorry to impute to Miss Henning any motive more complicated than

the desire to amuse herself, of a Saturday afternoon, by a ramble her

vigorous legs had no occasion to deprecate; but it must be confessed

that with her shrewd guess of this estimate of her as a ravening wolf

and of her early playmate as an unspotted lamb she laughed out, in

Miss Pynsent’s anxious face, irrelevantly and good-humouredly and

without deigning to explain. But what indeed had she come for if she

hadn’t come for Hyacinth? It was not for the love of the dressmaker’s

pretty ways. She remembered the boy and some of their tender passages,

and in the wantonness of her full-blown freedom—her attachment also

to any tolerable pretext for wandering through the streets of London

and gazing into shop-windows—had said to herself she might dedicate

an afternoon to the pleasures of memory, might revisit the scenes

of her childhood. She considered that her childhood had ended with

the departure of her family from Lomax Place. If the tenants of that

scarce-dissimulated slum had never learned what their banished fellows

were to go through she herself had at least retained a deep impression

of those horrible intermediate years. The family, as a family, had gone

downhill, to the very bottom; and in her humbler moments Millicent

sometimes wondered what lucky star had checked her own descent and

indeed enabled her to mount the slope again. In her humbler moments,

I say, for as a general thing she was provided with an explanation

of any good fortune that might befall her. What was more natural than

that a girl should achieve miracles when she was at once so handsome

and so clever? Millicent thought with compassion of the young persons

whom a niggardly fate had endowed with only one of these advantages.

She was good-natured, but she had no idea of gratifying Miss Pynsent’s

curiosity: it seemed to her quite a sufficient kindness to stimulate

it.

She told the dressmaker she had a high position at a great

haberdasher’s in the neighbourhood of Buckingham Palace; she was in

the department for jackets and mantles; she put on all these articles

to show them off to the customers, and on her person they appeared to

such advantage that nothing she took up ever failed to go off. Miss

Pynsent could imagine from this how highly her services were prized.

She had had a splendid offer from another establishment, an immense

one in Oxford Street, and was just thinking if she should accept it.

“We have to be beautifully dressed, but I don’t care, because I like

to look nice,” she remarked to her hostess, who at the end of half an

hour, very grave behind the clumsy glasses she had been obliged to wear

of late years, seemed still not to know what to make of her. On the

subject of her parents, of her history during the interval that was to

be accounted for, the girl was large and vague, and Miss Pynsent saw

that the domestic circle had not even a shadow of sanctity for her.

She stood on her own feet—stood very firm. Her staying so long, her

remaining over the half-hour, proved she had come for Hyacinth, since

poor Amanda gave her as little information as was decent, told her

nothing that would encourage or attract. She simply mentioned that Mr.

Robinson (she was careful to speak of him in that manner) had given his

attention to bookbinding and had served an apprenticeship in a house

where they turned out the best work of that kind that was to be found

in London.

“A bookbindery? Laws!” said Miss Henning. “Do you mean they get them

up for the shops? Well, I always thought he would have something to do

with books.” Then she added: “But I didn’t think he would ever follow

a trade.”

“A trade?” cried Miss Pynsent. “You should hear Mr. Robinson speak of

it. He considers it too lovely, quite one of the fine arts.”

Millicent smiled as if she knew how people often considered things,

and remarked that very likely it was tidy comfortable work, but she

couldn’t believe there was much to be seen in it. “Perhaps you’ll

say there’s more than there is here,” she went on, finding at last an

effect of irritation, or reprehension, an implication of aggressive

respectability, in the image of the patient dressmaker’s sitting for so

many years in her close brown little den with the foggy familiarities

of Lomax Place on the other side of the pane. Millicent liked to think

she herself was strong, yet she was not strong enough for that.

This allusion to her shrunken industry seemed to Miss Pynsent very

cruel; but she reflected it was natural one should be insulted if one

talked to a vulgar girl. She judged this young lady in the manner of

a person who was not vulgar herself, and if there was a difference

between them she was right in feeling it to be in her favour. Miss

Pynsent’s “cut,” as I have intimated, was not truly fashionable, and

in the application of gimp and the matching of colours she was not

absolutely to be trusted; but morally she had the best taste in the

world. “I haven’t so much work as I used to have, if that’s what you

mean. My eyes are not so good and my health has failed with advancing

years.”

I know not to what extent Millicent was touched by the dignity of

this admission, but she replied without embarrassment that what Miss

Pynsent wanted was a smart young assistant, some nice girl of a “tasty”

turn who would brighten up the business and give her new ideas. “I

can see you’ve got the same old ones, always: I can tell that by the

way you’ve stuck the braid on that dress”; and she directed a poke of

her neat little umbrella at the drapery in the dressmaker’s lap. She

continued to patronise and exasperate her, and to offer her consolation

and encouragement with the heaviest hand that had ever been applied to

Miss Pynsent’s sensitive surface. Poor Amanda ended by gazing at her as

if she had been a public performer of some kind, a ballad-singer or a

conjurer, and went so far as to ask herself whether the creature could

be (in her own mind) the “nice girl” who was to regild the tarnished

sign. Miss Pynsent had had assistants in the past—she had even once,

for a few months, had a “forewoman”; and some of these damsels had been

precious specimens, whose misdemeanours lived vividly in her memory.

Never, all the same, in her worst hour of delusion, had she trusted

her interests to such an exponent of the latest thing as this. She was

quickly reassured as to Millicent’s own views, perceiving more and more

that she was a tremendous highflyer, who required a much larger field

of action than the musty bower she now honoured, goodness only knew

why, with her presence. Miss Pynsent held her tongue as she always did

when the sorrow of her life had been touched, the thought of the slow,

inexorable decline on which she had entered that day, nearly ten years

before, when her hesitations and scruples resolved themselves into

a hideous mistake. The deep conviction of error on this unspeakably

important occasion had ached and throbbed within her ever since like

an incurable disease. She had sown in her boy’s mind the seeds of

shame and rancour; she had made him conscious of his stigma, of his

exquisitely vulnerable spot, and condemned him to know that for him

the sun would never shine as it shone for most others. By the time he

was sixteen years old she had learned—or believed she had learned—the

judgement he had passed on her, and at that period she had lived

through a series of horrible months, an ordeal in which every element

of her old prosperity perished. She cried her eyes out, on coming to

a sense of her blunder, so blinded and weakened herself with weeping

that she might for a while have believed she should never be able to

touch a needle again. She lost all interest in her work, and that play

of invention which had always been her pride deserted her, together

with the reputation of keeping the tidiest lodgings in Lomax Place.

A couple of commercial gentlemen and a Welsh plumber of religious

tendencies who for several years had made her establishment their home

withdrew their patronage on the ground that the airing of her beds

was not what it used to be, and disseminated cruelly this injurious

legend. She ceased to notice or to care how sleeves were worn, and on

the question of flounces and gores her mind was a blank. She fell into

a grievous debility and then into a long, low, languid fever, during

which Hyacinth tended her with a devotion that only made the wrong she

had done him seem sharper, and that determined in Mr. Vetch, so soon as

she was able to hold up her head a little, the impulse to come and sit

with her through the dull hours of convalescence. She re-established to

a certain extent, after a time, her connexion, so far as the letting of

her rooms was concerned (from the other department of her activity the

tide had ebbed apparently for ever); but nothing was the same again,

and she knew it was the beginning of the end. So it had gone on, and

she watched the end approach; she felt it very near indeed when a child

she had seen playing in the gutters came to flaunt it over her in silk

and lace. She gave a low, inaudible sigh of relief as Millicent at last

got up and stood there, smoothing the glossy cylinder of her umbrella.

“Mind you give my love to Hyacinth,” the girl said with an assurance

which showed all her insensibility to tacit protests. “I don’t care if

you do guess that if I’ve stopped so long it was in the hope he would

be dropping in to his tea. You can tell him I sat an hour, on purpose,

if you like; there’s no shame in my wanting to see my childhood’s

sweetheart. He may know I call him that!” Millicent continued with

her showroom laugh, as Miss Pynsent judged it to be; conferring these

permissions, successively, as if they were great indulgences. “Do

give him my best love and tell him I hope he’ll come and see me. I see

you won’t tell him anything. I don’t know what you’re afraid of; but

I’ll leave my card for him, all the same.” She drew forth a little

bright-coloured pocket-book, and it was with amazement that Miss

Pynsent saw her extract from it a morsel of engraved pasteboard—so

monstrous did it seem that one of the squalid little Hennings should

have lived to display this emblem of social consideration. Millicent

enjoyed the effect she produced as she laid the card on the table,

and gave another ringing peal of mirth at the sight of her hostess’s

half-hungry, half-astonished look. “What _do_ you think I want to do

with him? I could swallow him at a single bite!” she cried.

Poor Amanda gave no second glance at the document on the table, though

she had perceived it contained, in the corner, her visitor’s address,

which Millicent had amused herself ingeniously with not mentioning: she

only got up, laying down her work with an agitated hand, so that she

should be able to see Miss Henning well out of the house. “You needn’t

think I shall put myself out to keep him in the dark. I shall certainly

tell him you’ve been here, and exactly how you strike me.”

“Of course you’ll say something nasty—like you used to when I was a

child. You usually let me ’ave it then, you know!”

“Ah well,” said Miss Pynsent, nettled at this reminder of an acerbity

which the girl’s present development caused to appear absurdly

ineffectual, “you’re very different now, when I think what you’ve come

from.”

“What I’ve come from?” Millicent threw back her head and opened her

eyes very wide, while all her feathers and ribbons nodded. “Did you

want me to stick fast in this low place for the rest of my days? You’ve

had to stay in it yourself, so you might speak civilly of it.” She

coloured and raised her voice and looked magnificent in her scorn. “And

pray what have you come from yourself, and what has _he_ come from—the

mysterious ‘Mr. Robinson’ who used to be such a puzzle to the whole

Plice? I thought perhaps I might clear it up, but you haven’t told me

that yet!”

Miss Pynsent turned straight away, covering her ears with her hands.

“I’ve nothing to tell you! Leave my room—leave my house!” she cried

with a trembling voice.

V

It was in this way she failed either to see or to hear the opening

of the door of the room, which obeyed a slow, apparently cautious

impulse given it from the hall and revealed the figure of a young man

standing there with a short pipe in his teeth. There was something

in his face which immediately told Millicent Henning he had heard her

last tones resound into the passage. He entered as if, young as he was,

he knew that when women were squabbling men were not called upon to

be headlong, and now evidently wondered who the dressmaker’s evident

“match” might be. She recognised on the instant her old playmate,

and without reflexion, confusion or diplomacy, in the fulness of her

vulgarity and sociability, exclaimed at no lower pitch: “Gracious,

Hyacinth Robinson, is _that_ your form?”

Miss Pynsent turned round in a flash, but kept silent; then, very white

and shaken, took up her work again and seated herself in her window.

Hyacinth on his side stood staring—he blushed all over. He knew who she

was but didn’t say so; he only asked in a voice which struck the girl

as quite different from the old one—the one in which he used to tell

her she was beastly tiresome—“Is it of me you were speaking just now?”

“When I asked where you had come from? That was because we ’eard you

in the ’all,” said Millicent, smiling. “I suppose you’ve come from your

work.”

“You used to live in the Place—you always wanted to kiss me,” the

young man remarked with an effort not to show all the surprise and

satisfaction he felt. “Didn’t she live in the Place, Pinnie?”

Pinnie, for all answer, fixed a pair of strange pleading eyes upon

him, and Millicent broke out, with her recurrent laugh, in which the

dressmaker had been right in discovering the note of affectation, “Do

you want to know what you look like? You look for all the world like

a little plastered-up Frenchman! Don’t he look like a funny little

Frenchman, Miss Pynsent?” she went on as if she were on the best

possible terms with the mistress of the establishment.

Hyacinth caught a light from that afflicted woman; he saw something

in her face that he knew very well by this time and in the sight of

which he always found an odd, perverse, unholy relish. It seemed to say

that she prostrated herself, that she did penance in the dust, that

she was his to trample upon, to spit upon. He did neither of these

things, but she was constantly offering herself, and her permanent

humility, her perpetual abjection, was a vague counter-irritant to

the soreness lodged in his own heart for ever and which had often at

night made him cry with rage in his little room under the roof. Pinnie

meant this to-day as a matter of course, and could only especially mean

it in the presence of Miss Henning’s remark about his looking like a

Frenchman. He knew he looked like a Frenchman, he had often been told

so before, and a large part of the time, often quite grandly, he felt

like one—like one of those he had read about in Michelet and Carlyle.

He had picked up their language with the most extraordinary facility,

by the aid of one of his mates, a refugee from Paris, in the workroom,

and of a second-hand dog’s-eared dictionary bought for a shilling in

the Brompton Road during one of his interminable, restless, melancholy,

moody, yet all-observant strolls through London. He spoke it, he

believed, by a natural impulse, caught the accent, the gesture, the

movement of eyebrow and shoulder; so that on any occasion of his having

to pass for a foreigner—there was no telling what might happen—he

should certainly be able to do so to admiration, especially if he could

borrow a blouse. He had never seen a blouse in his life, but he knew

exactly the form and colour of such a garment and how it was worn.

What the complications might be which should compel him to assume the

disguise of a person of a social station lower still than his own he

would not for the world have mentioned to you; but as they were very

present to the mind of our imaginative, ingenious youth we shall catch

a glimpse of them in the course of a further acquaintance with him.

Actually, when there was no question of masquerading, it made him blush

again that such a note should be struck by a loud, laughing, handsome

girl who came back out of his past. There was more in Pinnie’s weak

eyes now than her usual rueful profession; there was a dumb intimation,

almost as pathetic as the other, that if he cared to let her off easily

he wouldn’t detain their terrible visitor very long. He had no wish

to do that; he kept the door open on purpose; he didn’t enjoy talking

to girls under Pinnie’s eyes and could see that this one had every

disposition to talk. So without responding to her observation about

his appearance he said, not knowing exactly what to say: “Have you come

back to live in the Place?”

“Heaven forbid I should ever do that!” cried Miss Henning with genuine

emotion. “I must live near the establishment in which I’m employed.”

“And what establishment is that now?” the young man asked, gaining

confidence and perceiving in detail how handsome she was. He hadn’t

roamed about London for nothing, and he knew that when a girl had such

looks a jocular tone of address, a pleasing freedom, was _de rigueur_;

so he added: “Is it the Bull and Gate or the Elephant and Castle?”

“A public-house? Well, you haven’t got the politeness of a Frenchman at

all events!” Her good-nature had come back to her perfectly, and her

resentment of his imputation of her looking like a barmaid—a blowsy

beauty who handled pewter—was tempered by her more and more curious

consideration of Hyacinth’s form. He was exceedingly “rum,” but he had

a stamp as sharp for her as that of a new coin and which also agreeably

suggested value. Since he remembered so well that she had been fond of

kissing him in their early days she would have liked to show herself

prepared to repeat this graceful attention. But she reminded herself

in time that her line should be religiously the ladylike, and she was

content to exclaim simply: “I don’t care what a man looks like so long

as he knows a lot. That’s the form _I_ like!”

Miss Pynsent had promised herself the satisfaction of taking no further

notice of her brilliant invader; but the temptation was great to

expose her to Hyacinth, in mitigation of her brilliancy, by remarking

sarcastically, according to opportunity, “Miss ’Enning wouldn’t live in

Lomax Plice for the world. She thinks it too dreadfully low.”

“So it is; it’s a beastly hole,” said the young man.

The poor dressmaker’s little dart fell to the ground and Millicent

exclaimed jovially, “Right you are!” while she directed to the object

of her childhood’s admiration an expression of face that put him more

and more at his ease.

“Don’t you suppose I know something?” he asked, planted before her with

his little legs slightly apart and, with his hands behind him, making

the open door waver to and fro.

“You? Oh, I don’t care a straw what you know!” she said; and he had

at any rate a mind sufficiently enriched to see what she meant by

that. If she meant he was so good-looking that he might pass on this

score alone her judgement was conceivable, though many women would

strongly have dissented from it. He was as small as he had announced

from the first—he had never got his growth—and she could easily see

that he was not what she at least would call strong. His bones were

small, his chest was narrow, his complexion pale, his whole figure

almost childishly slight; and Millicent noted afterwards that he had

a very delicate hand—the hand, as she said to herself, of a gentleman.

What she liked was his face and something jaunty and romantic, almost

theatrical, in his whole little person. Miss Henning was not acquainted

with any member of the dramatic profession, but she supposed vaguely

that that was the way an actor would look in private life. Hyacinth’s

features were perfect; his eyes, large and much divided, had as their

usual expression a kind of witty, almost an impertinent, candour, and

a small, soft, fair moustache disposed itself upon his upper lip in a

way that made him appear to smile even when his heart was heavy. The

waves of his dense fine hair clustered round a forehead which was high

enough to suggest remarkable things, and Miss Henning had observed

that when he first appeared he wore his little soft circular hat in

a way that left these frontal locks very visible. He was dressed in

an old brown velveteen jacket and wore exactly the bright-coloured

necktie which Miss Pynsent’s quick fingers used of old to shape out of

hoarded remnants of silk and muslin. He was shabby and work-stained,

but an observant eye would have caught the hint of an “arrangement” in

his dress (his appearance being plainly not a matter of indifference

to himself), while a painter (not of the heroic) would have liked to

make a sketch of him. There was something exotic in him, and yet, with

his sharp young face, destitute of bloom but not of sweetness, and a

certain conscious cockneyism that pervaded him, he was as strikingly

as Millicent, in her own degree, a product of the London streets and

the London air. He looked both ingenuous and slightly wasted, amused,

amusing and indefinably sad. Women had always found him touching, but

he made them—so they had repeatedly assured him—die of laughing.

“I think you had better shut the door,” said Miss Pynsent, meaning that

he had better shut their departing visitor out.

“Did you come here on purpose to see us?” he went on, not heeding

this injunction, of which he divined the spirit, and wishing the

girl would take her leave so that he might go out again with her.

He should like talking with her much better away from Pinnie, who

evidently was ready to stick a bodkin into her for reasons he perfectly

understood. He had seen plenty of them before, Pinnie’s reasons, even

where girls were concerned who were not nearly so good-looking as

this one. She was always in a fearful “funk” about their getting hold

of him and persuading him to make a marriage beneath his station.

His station!—poor Hyacinth had often asked himself and inquired of

Miss Pynsent what it could possibly be. He had thought of it bitterly

enough, wondering how in the world he could marry “beneath” it. He

would never marry at all—to that his mind was absolutely made up; he

would never hand on to another the burden that had made his own young

spirit so intolerably sore, the inheritance that had darkened the whole

threshold of his manhood. All the more reason why he should have his

compensation; why, if the soft society of women was to be enjoyed on

other terms, he should cultivate it with a bold free mind.

“I thought I’d just give a look at the old shop; I had an engagement

not far off,” Millicent said. “But I wouldn’t have believed any one who

had told me I should find you just where I left you.”

“We needed you to look after us!” Miss Pynsent irrepressibly exclaimed.

“Oh, you’re such a rattling swell yourself!” Hyacinth observed without

heeding the dressmaker.

“None of _your_ ‘rattling’ impudence! I’m as good a girl as there is in

London.” And to corroborate this Miss Henning went on: “If you were to

offer to see me a part of the way home I’d tell you I don’t knock about

that way with gentlemen.”

“I’ll go with you as far as you like,” Hyacinth replied simply, as if

he knew how to treat that sort of speech.

“Well, it’s only because I knew you as a baby!” And they went out

together, Hyacinth careful not to look at poor Pinnie at all (he felt

her glaring whitely and tearfully at him out of her dim corner—it had

by this time grown too dusky to work without a lamp) and his companion

giving her a cruelly familiar nod of farewell over her shoulder.

It was a long walk from Lomax Place to the quarter of the town in

which (to be near the haberdashers of the Buckingham Palace Road) Miss

Henning occupied a modest back room; but the influences of the hour

were such as to make the excursion very agreeable to our young man,

who liked the streets at all times, but especially at nightfall in the

autumn, of a Saturday, when in the vulgar districts the smaller shops

and open-air industries were doubly active, and big clumsy torches

flared and smoked over hand-carts and costermongers’ barrows drawn

up in the gutters. Hyacinth had roamed through the great city since

he was an urchin, but his imagination had never ceased to be stirred

by the preparations for Sunday that went on in the evening among the

toilers and spinners, his brothers and sisters, and he lost himself

in all the quickened crowding and pushing and staring at lighted

windows and chaffering at the stalls of fishmongers and hucksters.

He liked the people who looked as if they had got their week’s wage

and were prepared to lay it out discreetly; and even those whose use

of it would plainly be extravagant and intemperate; and, best of all,

those who evidently hadn’t received it at all and who wandered about

disinterestedly and vaguely, their hands in empty pockets, watching

others make their bargains and fill their satchels, or staring at the

striated sides of bacon, at the golden cubes and triangles of cheese,

at the graceful festoons of sausage, in the most brilliant of the

windows. He liked the reflexion of the lamps on the wet pavements, the

feeling and smell of the carboniferous London damp; the way the winter

fog blurred and suffused the whole place, made it seem bigger and more

crowded, produced halos and dim radiations, trickles, and evaporations

on the plates of glass. He moved in the midst of these impressions this

evening, but he enjoyed them in silence, with an attention taken up

mainly by his companion, and pleased to be already so intimate with a

young lady whom people turned round to look at. She herself affected to

speak of the rush and crush of the week’s end with disgust: she said

she liked the streets, but liked the respectable ones; she couldn’t

abide the smell of fish, which the whole place seemed full of, so that

she hoped they would soon get into the Edgeware Road, toward which

they tended and which was a proper street for a lady. To Hyacinth she

appeared to have no connexion with the long-haired little girl who,

in Lomax Place, years before, was always hugging a smutty doll and

courting his society; she was a stranger, a new acquaintance, and he

observed her in suspense, wondering by what transitions she had reached

her present pitch.

She enlightened him but little on this point, though she talked a

great deal on a variety of subjects and mentioned to him her habits,

her aspirations, her likes and dislikes—which last were as emphatic

as the giggles of a person tickled. She was tremendously particular,

difficult to please, he could see that; and she assured him she never

put up with anything a moment after she had ceased to care for it.

Especially was she particular about gentlemen’s society, and she made

it plain that a young fellow who wanted to have anything to say to her

must be in receipt of wages amounting at the least to fifty shillings a

week. Hyacinth assured her he didn’t earn that as yet, and she remarked

again that she made an exception for him because she knew all about

him (or if not all at least a great deal) and he could see that her

good-nature was equal to her beauty. She made such an exception that

when, after they were moving down the Edgeware Road (which had still

the brightness of late closing, but with more nobleness), he proposed

she should enter a coffee-house with him and “take something” (he

could hardly tell himself afterwards what brought him to this point)

she acceded without a demur—without a demur even on the ground of

his slender earnings. Slender as they were he had them in his pocket

(they had been destined in some degree for Pinnie) and therefore felt

equal to the occasion. Millicent partook profusely of tea and bread

and butter, with a relish of raspberry jam, and thought the place most

comfortable, though he himself, after finding himself ensconced, was

visited by doubts of its propriety, suggested, among several things,

by photographs, on the walls, of young ladies in tights. He himself

was hungry, he had not yet had his tea, but he was too excited, too

preoccupied to eat; the situation made him restless and gave him

thrills; it seemed the beginning of something new and rare. He had

never yet “stood” even a glass of beer to a girl of Millicent’s stamp—a

girl who rustled and glittered and smelt of musk—and if she should turn

out as jolly a specimen of the sex as she seemed it might make a great

difference in his leisure hours, in his evenings, in which he had often

felt a likeness to great square blackboards uninscribed with a stroke

of chalk. That it would also make a difference in his savings (he was

under a pledge to Pinnie and to Mr. Vetch to put by something every

week) it didn’t concern him for the moment to reflect; and indeed,

though he thought it odious and insufferable to be poor, the ways and

means of ceasing to be so had hitherto left his fancy unstirred. He

knew what Millicent’s age must be, but felt her nevertheless older,

much older, than himself—she seemed to know so much about London

and about life; and this made it still more of a sensation to be

entertaining her like a young swell. He thought of it too in connexion

with the question of the character of the establishment; if this

character was what it easily might be she would perceive it as soon

as he, and very likely it would be a part of the general initiation

she had given him an impression of that she wouldn’t mind so long as

the tea was strong and the bread and butter thick. She described to

him what had passed between Miss Pynsent and herself (she didn’t call

her Pinnie, and he was glad, for he wouldn’t have liked it) before he

came in, and let him know that she should never dare to come to the

place again, as his mother would tear her eyes out. Then she checked

herself. “But of course she ain’t your mother! How stupid I am! I keep

forgetting.”

Hyacinth had, as he supposed, from far back cultivated a manner with

which he could meet allusions of this kind: he had had first and

last so many opportunities to practise it. Therefore he looked at his

companion very steadily while he said: “My mother died many years ago;

she was a great invalid. But Pinnie has been awfully good to me.”

“My mother’s dead too”—Miss Henning was prompt, as if “capping” it.

“She died very suddenly. I daresay you remember her in the Plice.”

Then, while Hyacinth disengaged from the past the obscure figure of

Mrs. Henning, of whom he mainly remembered that she used to strike him

as cross and dirty, the girl added, smiling, but with more sentiment,

“But I’ve had no Pinnie.”

“You look as if you could take care of yourself.”

“Well, I’m very confiding,” said Millicent Henning. Then she asked

what had become of Mr. Vetch. “We used to say that if Miss Pynsent was

your mamma he was your papa. In our family we used to call him Miss

Pynsent’s young man.”

“He’s her young man still,” Hyacinth returned. “He’s our best friend—or

supposed to be. He got me the place I’m in now. He lives by his fiddle,

as he used to do.”

Millicent looked a little at her companion, after which she observed,

“I should have thought he would have got you a place at his theatre.”

“At his theatre? That would have been no use. I don’t play any

instrument.”

“I don’t mean in the orchestra, you gaby! You’d look very nice in

a fancy costume.” She had her elbows on the table and her shoulders

lifted, an attitude of extreme familiarity. He was on the point of

replying that he didn’t care for fancy costumes, he wished to go

through life in his own character; but he checked himself with the

reflexion that this was exactly what he was apparently destined not

to do. His own character? He was to cover that up as carefully as

possible; he was to go through life in a mask, in a borrowed mantle;

he was to be every day and every hour an actor. Suddenly and with

the utmost irrelevance Miss Henning inquired: “Is Miss Pynsent some

relation? What gave her any right over you?”

Hyacinth had an answer ready for this question; he had determined to

say as he had several times said before: “Miss Pynsent’s an old friend

of my family. My mother was very fond of her and she was very fond of

my mother.” He repeated the formula now, looking at the girl with the

same inscrutable calmness, as he fancied; though a remark more to his

taste would have been that his mother was none of her business. But

she was too handsome for such risks, and she presented her large fair

face to him across the table with an air of solicitation to be cosy and

comfortable. There were things in his heart and a torment and a hidden

passion in his life which he should be glad enough to lay open to some

woman. He believed that perhaps this would be the cure ultimately; that

in return for something he might drop, syllable by syllable, into some

listening ear that would be attached to some kissable cheek, certain

other words would be spoken to him which would make his pain for ever

less sharp. But what woman could he trust, what ear would be both safe

and happily enough attached? How much didn’t he already ask? The answer

was not in this loud fresh laughing creature, whose sympathy couldn’t

have the fineness he was looking for, since her curiosity was vulgar.

Hyacinth objected to the vulgar as much as Miss Pynsent herself;

in this respect she had long since discovered that he was after her

own heart. He had not at any rate now taken up the subject of Mrs.

Henning’s death; he felt himself incapable of researches into that lady

and had no desire for knowledge of Millicent’s relationships. Moreover

he always suffered, to sickness, when people began to hover about the

question of his origin, the reasons why Pinnie had had the care of him

from a baby. Mrs. Henning had been repulsive, but at least her daughter

could speak of her. “Mr. Vetch has changed his lodgings: he moved

out of 17 three years ago,” he said, to vary the topic. “He couldn’t

stand the other people in the house; there was a man who played the

accordeon.”

Millicent, however, was but moderately interested in this anecdote,

though wanting to know why people should like Mr. Vetch’s fiddle any

better. Then she added: “And I think that while he was about it he

might have put you into something better than a bookbinder’s.”

“He wasn’t obliged to put me into anything. It’s a very good place.”

“All the same, it isn’t where I should have looked to find you,” the

girl declared, not so much in the tone of wishing to offer him tribute

as of resentment at having miscalculated.

“Where should you have looked to find me? In the House of Commons? It’s

a pity you couldn’t have told me in advance what you would have liked

me to be.”

She faced him over her cup while she drank in ladylike sips. “Do you

know what they used to say in the Plice? That your father was a lord.”

“Very likely. That’s the kind of rot they talk in that precious hole,”

the young man said without blenching.

“Well, perhaps he was,” Millicent ventured.

“He may have been a prime-minister for all the good it has done me.”

“Fancy your talking as if you didn’t know!” said Millicent.

“Finish your tea—don’t mind how I talk.”

“Well, you _’ave_ got a temper!” she archly retorted. “I should have

thought you’d be a clerk at a banker’s.”

“Do they select them for their tempers?”

“You know what I mean. You used to be too clever to follow a trade.”

“Well, I’m not clever enough to live on air.”

“You might be, really, for all the tea you drink! Why didn’t you go in

for some high profession?”

“How was I to go in? Who the devil was to help me?” Hyacinth asked with

a certain vibration.

“Haven’t you got any relations?” said Millicent after a moment.

“What are you doing? Are you trying to make me swagger?”

When he spoke sharply she only laughed, not in the least ruffled, and

by the way she looked at him seemed to like the effect. “Well, I’m

sorry you’re only a journeyman,” she went on as she pushed away her

cup.

“So am I,” Hyacinth answered; but he called for the bill as if he had

been an employer of labour. Then while they waited he remarked to his

companion that he didn’t believe she had an idea of what his work was

and how charming it could be. “Yes, I get up books for the shops,” he

said when she had asserted that she perfectly understood. “But the art

of the binder’s an exquisite art.”

“So Miss Pynsent told me. She said you had some samples at home. I

should like to see them.”

“You wouldn’t know how good they are,” he finely smiled.

He expected she would exclaim in answer that he was an impudent wretch,

and for a moment she seemed on the point of doing so. But the words

changed on her lips and she replied almost tenderly: “That’s just the

way you used to speak to me years ago in the Plice.”

“I don’t care about that. I hate all that time.”

“Oh, so do I, if you come to that,” said Millicent as if she could

rise to any breadth of view. With which she returned to her idea that

he had not done himself justice. “You used always to have your nose in

something or other. I never thought you’d work with your ’ands.”

This seemed to irritate him, and, having paid the bill and given

threepence, ostentatiously, to the young woman with a languid manner

and hair of an unnatural yellow who had waited on them, he said: “You

may depend upon it I shan’t do it an hour longer than I can help.”

“What will you do then?”

“Oh, you’ll see some day.” In the street, after they had begun to walk

again, he went on: “You speak as if I could have my pick. What was an

obscure little beggar to do, buried in a squalid corner of London under

a million of idiots? I had no help, no influence, no acquaintance of

any kind with professional people, and no means of getting at them.

I had to do something; I couldn’t go on living on Pinnie. Thank God I

help her now a little. I took what I could get.” He spoke as if he had

been touched by the imputation of having derogated.

Millicent seemed to imply that he defended himself successfully when

she said: “You express yourself like a reg’lar gentleman”—a speech

to which he made no response. But he began to talk again afterwards,

and, the evening having definitely set in, his companion took his arm

for the rest of the way home. By the time he reached her door he had

confided to her that in secret he wrote—quite as for publication; he

was haunted with the dream of literary distinction. This appeared

to impress her, and she branched off to remark, with the agreeable

incoherence that characterised her, that she didn’t care anything for

a man’s family if she liked the man himself; she thought families and

that sort of rot were about played out. Hyacinth wished she would leave

his origin alone; and while they lingered in front of her house before

she went in he broke out:

“I’ve no doubt you’re a jolly girl, and I’m very happy to have seen you

again. But you’ve awfully little tact.”

“_I_ have little tact? You should see me work off an old jacket!”

He was silent a little, standing before her with his hands in his

pockets. “It’s a good job you’re so lovely.”

Millicent didn’t blush at this compliment, and probably didn’t

understand all it conveyed, but she looked into his eyes a while,

with all the smile that showed her teeth, and then came back more

inconsequently than ever. “Come now, who are you?”

“Who am I? I’m a wretched little ‘forwarder’ in the shop.”

“I didn’t think I ever could fancy any one in that line!” she

competently cried. Then she let him know she couldn’t ask him in,

as she made it a point not to receive gentlemen, but she didn’t mind

if she took another walk with him and she didn’t care if she met him

somewhere—if it were handy enough. As she lived so far from Lomax Place

she didn’t care if she met him half-way. So in the dusky by-street

in Pimlico, before separating, they took a casual tryst; the most

interesting, the young man felt, that had yet been—he could scarcely

call it granted him.