The Princess looked grave, as if her old friend’s departure had been indeed a very serious incident. “You may imagine how I feel it! It leaves me completely alone; it makes, in the eyes of the world, an immense difference in my position. However, I don’t consider the eyes of the world. At any rate, she couldn’t put up with me any more—it appears that I am more and more shocking; and it was written!” On Hyacinth’s asking what the old lady would do, she replied, “I suppose she will go and live with my husband.” Five minutes later she inquired of him whether the same reason that he had mentioned just before was the explanation of his absence from Audley Court. Mr Muniment had told her that he had not been near him and his sister for more than a month.
“No, it isn’t the fear of learning something that would make me uneasy: because, somehow, in the first place it isn’t natural to feel uneasy about Paul, and in the second, if it were, he never lets one see anything. It is simply the general sense of real divergence of view. When that divergence becomes sharp, it is better not to pester each other.”
“I see what you mean. But you might go and see his sister.”
“I don’t like her,” said Hyacinth, simply.
“Ah, neither do I!” the Princess exclaimed; while her visitor remained conscious of the perfect composure, the absence of false shame, with which she had referred to their common friend. But she was silent after this, and he judged that he had stayed long enough and sufficiently taxed a preoccupied attention. He got up, and was bidding her good-night, when she checked him by saying, suddenly, “By the way, your not going to see so good a friend as Mr Muniment, because you disapprove to-day of his work, suggests to me that you will be in an awkward fix, with your disapprovals, the day you are called upon to serve the cause according to your vow.”
“Oh, of course I have thought of that,” said Hyacinth, smiling.
“And would it be indiscreet to ask what you have thought?”
“Ah, so many things, Princess! It would take me a long time to say.”
“I have never talked to you about this, because it seemed to me indelicate, and the whole thing too much a secret of your own breast for even so intimate a friend as I have been to have a right to meddle with it. But I have wondered much—seeing that you cared less and less for the people—how you would reconcile your change of heart with the performance of your engagement. I pity you, my poor friend,” the Princess went on, with a heavenly sweetness, “for I can imagine nothing more terrible than to find yourself face to face with such an engagement, and to feel at the same time that the spirit which prompted it is dead within you.”
“Terrible, terrible, most terrible,” said Hyacinth, gravely, looking at her.