“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.”