“That was my fault, that he ever learned it. I suppose he also told you that.”
“Yes, but I think he understood your idea. If you had the question to determine again, would you judge differently?”
“I thought it would do him good,” said the old man, simply and rather wearily.
“Well, I dare say it has,” the Princess rejoined, with the manner of wishing to encourage him.
“I don’t know what was in my head. I wanted him to quarrel with society. Now I want him to be reconciled to it,” Mr Vetch remarked, earnestly. He appeared to wish the Princess to understand that he made a great point of this.
“Ah, but he is!” she immediately returned. “We often talk about that; he is not like me, who see all kinds of abominations. He’s a tremendous aristocrat. What more would you have?”
“Those are not the opinions that he expresses to me,” said Mr Vetch, shaking his head sadly. “I am greatly distressed, and I don’t understand. I have not come here with the presumptuous wish to cross-examine you, but I should like very much to know if I am wrong in believing that he has gone about with you in the bad quarters—in St Giles’s and Whitechapel.”
“We have certainly inquired and explored together,” the Princess admitted, “and in the depths of this huge, luxurious, wanton, wasteful city we have seen sights of unspeakable misery and horror. But we have been not only in the slums; we have been to a music-hall and a penny-reading.”
The fiddler received this information at first in silence, so that his hostess went on to mention some of the phases of life they had observed; describing with great vividness, but at the same time with a kind of argumentative moderation, several scenes which did little honour to ‘our boasted civilisation’. “What wonder is it, then, that he should tell me that things cannot go on any longer as they are?” he asked, when she had finished. “He said only the other day that he should regard himself as one of the most contemptible of human beings if he should do nothing to alter them, to better them.”
“What wonder, indeed? But if he said that, he was in one of his bad days. He changes constantly, and his impressions change. The misery of the people is by no means always weighing on his heart. You tell me what he has told you; well, he has told me that the people may perish over and over, rather than the conquests of civilisation shall be sacrificed to them. He declares, at such moments, that they will be sacrificed—sacrificed utterly—if the ignorant masses get the upper hand.”