“To what did you pledge yourself?”
“I took a vow—a tremendous, terrible vow—in the presence of four witnesses,” Hyacinth went on.
“And what was it about, your vow?”
“I gave my life away,” said Hyacinth, smiling.
She looked at him askance, as if to see how he would make such an announcement as that; but she wore no smile—her face was politely grave. They moved together a moment, exchanging a glance, in silence, and then she said, “Ah, well, then, I’m all the more glad you stayed!”
“That was one of the reasons.”
“I wish you had waited—till after you had been here,” the Princess remarked.
“Why till after I had been here?”
“Perhaps then you wouldn’t have given away your life. You might have seen reasons for keeping it.” And now, at last, she treated the matter gaily, as Hyacinth had done. He replied that he had not the least doubt that, on the whole, her influence was relaxing; but without heeding this remark she went on: “Be so good as to tell me what you are talking about.”
“I’m not afraid of you, but I’ll give you no names,” said Hyacinth; and he related what had happened in the back-room in Bloomsbury, in the course of that evening of which I have given some account. The Princess listened, intently, while they strolled under the budding trees with a more interrupted step. Never had the old oaks and beeches, renewing themselves in the sunshine as they did to-day, or naked in some gray November, witnessed such an extraordinary series of confidences, since the first pair that sought isolation wandered over the grassy slopes and ferny dells beneath them. Among other things Hyacinth mentioned to his companion that he didn’t go to the ‘Sun and Moon’ any more; he now perceived, what he ought to have perceived long before, that this particular temple of their faith, and everything that pretended to get hatched there, was a hopeless sham. He had been a rare muff, from the first, to take it seriously. He had done so mainly because a friend of his, in whom he had confidence, appeared to set him the example; but now it turned out that this friend (it was Paul Muniment again, by the way) had always thought the men who went there a pack of duffers and was only trying them because he tried everything. There was nobody you could begin to call a first-rate man there, putting aside another friend of his, a Frenchman named Poupin—and Poupin was magnificent, but he wasn’t first-rate. Hyacinth had a standard, now that he had seen a man who was the very incarnation of his programme. You felt that he was a big chap the very moment you came into his presence.