“It was sure to be something good if he said it; he is very wise.”
“That makes his warning very flattering to me! What does he know about me?”
“Oh, nothing, of course, except the little that I could tell him. He only spoke on general grounds.”
“I like his name—Paul Muniment,” the Princess said. “If he resembles it, I think I should like him.”
“You would like him much better than me.”
“How do you know how much—or how little—I like you? I am determined to keep hold of you, simply for what you can show me.” She paused a moment, with her beautiful, intelligent eyes smiling into his own, and then she continued, “On general grounds, bien entendu, your friend was quite right to warn you. Now those general grounds are just what I have undertaken to make as small as possible. It is to reduce them to nothing that I talk to you, that I conduct myself with regard to you as I have done. What in the world is it I am trying to do but, by every device that my ingenuity suggests, fill up the inconvenient gulf that yawns between my position and yours? You know what I think of ‘positions’; I told you in London. For Heaven’s sake, let me feel that I have—a little—succeeded!” Hyacinth satisfied her sufficiently to enable her, five minutes later, apparently to entertain no further doubt on the question of his staying over. On the contrary, she burst into a sudden ebullition of laughter, exchanging her bright, lucid insistence for one of her singular sallies. “You must absolutely go with me to call on the Marchants; it will be too delightful to see you there!”
As he walked up and down the empty drawing-room it occurred to him to ask himself whether that was mainly what she was keeping him for—so that he might help her to play one of her tricks on the good people at Broome. He paced there, in the still candlelight, for a longer time than he measured; until the butler came and stood in the doorway, looking at him silently and fixedly, as if to let him know that he interfered with the custom of the house. He had told the Princess that what determined him was the thought of the manner in which he might exercise his craft in her service; but this was only half the influence that pressed him into forgetfulness of what he had most said to himself when, in Lomax Place, in an hour of unprecedented introspection, he wrote the letter by which he accepted the invitation to Medley. He would go there (so he said) because a man must be gallant, especially if he be a little bookbinder; but after he should be there he would insist at every step upon knowing what he was in for. The change that had taken place in him now, from one moment to another, was that he had simply ceased to care what he was in for. All warnings, reflections, considerations of verisimilitude, of the delicate, the natural and the possible, of the value of his independence, had become as nothing to him. The cup of an exquisite experience—a week in that enchanted palace, a week of such immunity from Lomax Place and old Crookenden as he had never dreamed of—was at his lips; it was purple with the wine of novelty, of civilisation, and he couldn’t push it aside without drinking. He might go home ashamed, but he would have for evermore in his mouth the taste of nectar. He went upstairs, under the eye of the butler, and on his way to his room, at the turning of a corridor, found himself face to face with Madame Grandoni. She had apparently just issued from her own apartment, the door of which stood open, near her; she might have been hovering there in expectation of his footstep. She had donned her dressing-gown, which appeared to give her every facility for respiration, but she had not yet parted with her wig. She still had her pink French book under her arm; and her fat little hands, tightly locked together in front of her, formed the clasp of her generous girdle.
“Do tell me it is positive, Mr Robinson!” she said, stopping short.
“What is positive, Madame Grandoni?”
“That you take the train in the morning.”