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 gray,

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

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

light filtered in from the street, through the narrow, dusty glass

above it, and then the very smell and sense of the place returned to

Millicent; a kind of musty dimness, with the vision of a small, steep

staircase at the end, covered with a strip of oilcloth which she

recognised, and made a little less dark by a window in the bend (you

could see it from the hall), from which you could almost bump your head

against the house behind. Nothing was changed except Miss Pynsent, and

of course the girl herself. She had noticed, outside, that 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 Miss Pynsent was looking at her hat, which was a

wonderful composition of flowers and ribbons; her eyes had travelled up

and down Millicent’s whole person, but they rested in fascination upon

this 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 that 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 that 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; and 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 is 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, covered with a light, shrunken shroud

of a 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, with 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 her, 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 (they

were stuck all over the front of her dress), but there were no rustling

fabrics tossed in heaps about 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 hostess’s business

had not increased, and felt a kind of good-humoured, 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 metropolis.

“Now tell me, how is Hyacinth? I should like so much to see him,” she

remarked, extending a pair of large protrusive feet and supporting

herself on the sofa by her hands.

“Hyacinth?” Miss Pynsent repeated, with majestic blankness, as if she

had never heard of such a person. She felt that the girl was cruelly,

scathingly, well dressed; she couldn’t imagine who she was, nor with

what design she could 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 see if I don’t!”

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

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

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

directly. 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 so,” Miss Pynsent rejoined, 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 dare say it doesn’t matter to you now, does it?” said the

dressmaker, seating herself, but quite unable to take up her work,

absorbed as she was in the examination of her visitor.

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

had nothing to fear from human judgments.

“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 twenty.” 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 very

handsome, with a shining, bold, good-natured eye, a fine, free, facial

oval, an abundance of brown hair, and a smile which showed the

whiteness of her teeth. Her head was set upon a fair, strong neck, and

her tall 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 reflection that she was common, for all 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 hustling 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 accumulated 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 made upon Millicent, and how the whole

place seemed to that prosperous young lady to smell of poverty and

failure. Her childish image of Miss Pynsent had represented her as

delicate and dainty, with round loops of hair fastened on her temples

by combs, and associations of brilliancy arising from the constant

manipulation of precious stuffs—tissues at least which 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 did not disguise her meagreness. Miss Henning thanked her stars, as

she had often done before, that she had not 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 upon her

good fortune in being attached to a more exciting, a more dramatic,

department of the dressmaking business, 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 Miss Pynsent’s eyes suspicious it must be confessed that

this lady felt very much upon her guard in the 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, whose

vicissitudes she was able to follow, as she sat at her window at work,

by simply inclining an ear to the thin partition behind her—these

scenes, amid which the crash of crockery and the imprecations of the

wounded were frequently audible, had long been the scandal of a humble

but harmonious neighbourhood. Mr Henning was supposed to occupy 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 in 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 family 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 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 conviction that

none of them would come to any good, and Millicent least of all.

When, therefore, this young lady reappeared, with all the signs of

accomplished survival, she could not fail to ask herself whether, under

a specious seeming, the phenomenon did not 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 alarm and her curiosity she

passed an uncomfortable half-hour. She felt that the familiar,

mysterious creature was playing with her; revenging herself for former

animadversions, for having been snubbed and miscalled by a peering

little spinster who now could 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 inveigle, to corrupt 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 which her vigorous legs had no

occasion to deprecate; but it must be confessed that when it occurred

to her that Miss Pynsent regarded her as a ravening wolf and her early

playmate as an unspotted lamb, she laughed out, in her hostess’s

anxious face, irrelevantly and good-humouredly, without deigning to

explain. But what, indeed, had she come for, if she had not come after

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—she had said to herself that she would

dedicate an afternoon to the pleasures of memory, would 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 obscure locality never learned what their banished fellows went

through, Millicent retained a deep impression of those horrible

intermediate years. The family, as a family, had gone down-hill, 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 do well

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 that 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, in Oxford Street, and

she was just thinking whether 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 which she had been obliged to wear of

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

subject of her family, 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, and she stood very firm. Her staying so long,

her remaining over the half-hour, proved to the dressmaker that she had

come for Hyacinth; for 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 at an establishment 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 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 will say

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

effect of irritation, of reprehension, an implication of aggressive

respectability, in the image of the patient dressmaker, 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

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

This allusion to her shrunken industry seemed to Miss Pynsent very

cruel; but she reflected that 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 distribution of ornament she was not 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 with a

pretty taste, who would brighten up the business and give her new

ideas. “I can see you have got the same old ones, always: I can tell

that by the way you have stuck the braid on that dress;” and she

directed a poke of her neat little umbrella to 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 were a public performer of some kind,

a ballad-singer or a conjurer, and went so far as to ask herself

whether the hussy 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 extravagant baggage

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, heaven 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 that 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 judgment he passed upon 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 aberration, blinded and

weakened herself with weeping, so that for a moment it seemed as if she

should never be able to touch a needle again. She lost all interest in

her work, and that artistic imagination 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

which only made the wrong she had done him seem more bitter, and in

which, so soon as she was able to hold up her head a little, Mr Vetch

came and sat with her through the dull hours of convalescence. She

re-established to a certain extent, after a while, her connection, so

far as the letting of her rooms was concerned (from the other

department of her activity the tide had ebbed apparently forever); 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

was 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 when at last Millicent got up and stood before her,

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 have 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 little friend. He

may know I call him that!” Millicent continued, with her show-room

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

successively, as if they were great indulgences. “Do give him my 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 merriment at the sight of her hostess’s half-angry,

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 a trembling 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 have 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 let me ’ave it then, you know!”

“Ah, well,” said Miss Pynsent, nettled at being reminded of an acerbity

which the girl’s present development caused to appear ridiculously

ineffectual, “you are 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

have 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’, that used to be such a puzzle to the

whole Place? 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

have nothing to tell you! Leave my room—leave my house!” she cried,

with a trembling voice.

V

It was in this way that the dressmaker 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 that he

had heard, outside, her last resounding tones. He entered as if, young

as he was, he knew that when women were squabbling men were not called

upon to be headlong, and evidently wondered who the dressmaker’s

brilliant adversary might be. She recognised on the instant her old

playmate, and without reflection, confusion or diplomacy, in the

fullness of her vulgarity and sociability, she exclaimed, in no lower

pitch, “Gracious, Hyacinth Robinson, is _that_ your form?”

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

white and trembling, took up her work again and seated herself in her

window.

Hyacinth Robinson stood staring; then he blushed all over. He knew who

she was, but he 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 have 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 agitation

that 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 Frenchman! Don’t he look like a little Frenchman, Miss Pynsent?”

she went on, as if she were on the best possible terms with the

mistress of the establishment.

Hyacinth exchanged a look with that afflicted woman; he saw something

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

which always gave him an odd, perverse, unholy satisfaction. 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 sort of counter-irritant to

the soreness lodged in his own heart for ever, which had often made him

cry with rage at night, in his little room under the roof. Pinnie meant

that, to-day, as a matter of course, and she 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 he felt like one—like one of

those he had read about in Michelet and Carlyle. He had picked up the

French tongue with the most extraordinary facility, with 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, in one of his interminable, restless, melancholy, moody,

yet all-observant strolls through London. He spoke it (as he believed)

as if by instinct, caught the accent, the gesture, the movement of

eyebrow and shoulder; so that if it should become necessary in certain

contingencies that he should pass for a foreigner he had an idea that

he might do so triumphantly, once 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 these contingencies

might be which should compel him to assume the disguise of a person of

a social station lower still than his own, Hyacinth 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. At the present moment,

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 profession; there was a dumb intimation, almost as

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

not 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 he 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 have to 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 was so

handsome as that, 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 bar-maid—a blowzy

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

consideration of Hyacinth’s form. He was exceedingly ‘rum’, but this

quality took her fancy, and since he remembered so well that she had

been fond of kissing him, in their early days she would have liked to

say to him that she stood prepared to repeat this form of 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’s clever. 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, as a mitigation of her brilliancy, by remarking

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

Lomax Place for the world. She thinks it too abominably 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 a smile that put him more and more at his

ease.

“Don’t you suppose I’m clever?” he asked, planted before her with his

little legs slightly apart, while, with his hands behind him, he made

the open door waver to and fro.

“You? Oh, I don’t care whether you are or not!” said Millicent Henning;

and Hyacinth was at any rate quick-witted enough to see what she meant

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

score alone her judgment was conceivable, though many women would

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

threatened—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 perceived afterward 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 entertaining, 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 candour, and a small, soft, fair

moustache disposed itself upon his upper lip in a way that made him

look as if he were smiling 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 the

observant eye would have noted an idea in his dress (his appearance was

plainly not a matter of indifference to himself), and a painter (not of

the heroic) would have liked to make a sketch of him. There was

something exotic about him, and yet, with his sharp young face,

destitute of bloom, but not of sweetness, and a certain conscious

cockneyism which 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; yet 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?” Hyacinth asked, 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 some woman getting hold of him, and

persuading him to make a marriage beneath his station. His

station!—poor Hyacinth had often asked himself, and Miss Pynsent, what

it could possibly be. He had thought of it bitterly enough, and

wondered 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 which had made his own young spirit so

intolerably sore, the inheritance which 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 would 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 exclaimed,

irrepressibly.

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

the dressmaker.

“None of your 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 should 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 an outrageously friendly 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 haberdasher’s in 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, vaguely, with 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 reflection 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 she liked the respectable ones; she couldn’t

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

she hoped they would soon get into the Edgware Road, towards which they

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

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

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

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

he observed her curiously, 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. The latter were very numerous. She

was tremendously particular, difficult to please, he could see that;

and she assured him that she never put up with anything a moment after

it had ceased to be agreeable to her. 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 told her

that 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 Edgware Road (which had still the brightness of late

closing, but with more nobleness), he proposed that 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, Hyacinth had them in his pocket (they

had been destined in some degree for Pinnie), and he 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 as to its respectability, suggested, among other things, by

photographs, on the walls, of young ladies in tights. Hyacinth 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

palpitations; it seemed to be the beginning of something new. 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, which were often very

dull. 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

becoming rich had hitherto not greatly occupied him. He knew what

Millicent’s age must be, but felt, nevertheless, as if she were older,

much older, than himself—she appeared 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

connection with the question of the respectability of the

establishment; if this element was deficient 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 shouldn’t mind

it 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. “Of course she ain’t your mother! How stupid I am! I

keep forgetting.”

Hyacinth had long since convinced himself that he had acquired 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 remarked. “She died very

suddenly. I dare say you remember her in the Place.” Then, while

Hyacinth disengaged from the past the wavering figure of Mrs Henning,

of whom he mainly remembered that she used to strike him as dirty, the

girl added, smiling, but with more sentiment, “But I have 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 said. “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 remarked,

“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 would look very nice in a

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

lifted, in 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

reflection that this was exactly what, apparently, he was 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, 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 is 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 Millicent

with the same inscrutable calmness (as he fancied), though what he

would have liked to say to her would have been that his mother was none

of her business. But she was too handsome to talk that way to, 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 a listening feminine ear, 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 safe? 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 taken up the subject of Mrs Henning’s

death; he felt himself incapable of inquiring about 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 untidy, but at least her daughter

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

No. 17, three years ago,” he said, to vary the topic. “He couldn’t

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

accordeon.”

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

she wanted 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,”

Millicent declared, not so much in the tone of wishing to pay him a

compliment 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 looked at him, over her cup, while she drank, in several sips. “Do

you know what they used to say in the Place? 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 prince, 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!” the girl exclaimed, archly. “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 inquired,

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 it. “Well, I’m sorry you’re

only a journeyman,” she went on, pushing away her cup.

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

been an employer of labour. Then, while it was being brought, 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 retorted that she perfectly

understood. “But the art of the binder is 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,” said Hyacinth, smiling.

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

wretch, and for a moment she seemed to be 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. And then she returned to her idea that he

had not done himself justice. “You used always to be reading: I never

thought you would 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 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: he had a dream of literary

distinction. This appeared to impress her, and she branched off to

remark, with an irrelevance that characterised her, that she didn’t

care anything about a man’s family if she liked the man himself; she

thought families were played out. Hyacinth wished she would leave his

alone; and while they lingered in front of her house, before she went

in, he said—

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

you again. But you have awfully little tact.”

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

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

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

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

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

a smile that showed her teeth, and then said, more inconsequently than

ever, “Come now, who are you?”

“Who am I? I’m a wretched little bookbinder.”

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

exclaimed. Then she let him know that 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. 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.