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.