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