“Oh, you wouldn’t, would you?” cried Pinnie, with a kind of conciliatory eagerness. “That’s the way I like to hear you talk!”
“Do you think I would marry any one who would marry me?” Hyacinth went on. “The kind of girl who would look at me is the kind of girl I wouldn’t look at.” He struck Pinnie as having thought it all out; which did not surprise her, as she had been familiar, from his youth, with his way of following things up. But she was always delighted when he made a remark which showed he was conscious of being of fine clay—flashed out an allusion to his not being what he seemed. He was not what he seemed, but even with Pinnie’s valuable assistance he had not succeeded in representing to himself, very definitely, what he was. She had placed at his disposal, for this purpose, a passionate idealism which, employed in some case where it could have consequences, might have been termed profligate, and which never cost her a scruple or a compunction.
“I’m sure a princess might look at you and be none the worse!” she declared, in her delight at this assurance, more positive than any she had yet received, that he was safe from the worst danger. This the dressmaker considered to be the chance of his marrying some person like herself. Still it came over her that his taste might be lowered, and before the subject was dropped, on this occasion, she said to him that of course he must be quite aware of all that was wanting to such a girl as Millicent Henning—she pronounced her name at last.
“Oh, I don’t bother about what’s wanting to her; I’m content with what she has.”
“Content, dearest—how do you mean?” the little dressmaker quavered. “Content to make an intimate friend of her?”
“It is impossible I should discuss these matters with you,” Hyacinth replied, grandly.
“Of course I see that. But I should think she would bore you sometimes,” Miss Pynsent murmured, cunningly.
“She does, I assure you, to extinction!”
“Then why do you spend every evening with her?”
“Where should you like me to spend my evenings? At some beastly public-house—or at the Italian opera?” His association with Miss Henning was not so close as that, but nevertheless he wouldn’t take the trouble to prove to poor Pinnie that he enjoyed her society only two or three times a week; that on other evenings he simply strolled about the streets (this boyish habit clung to him), and that he had even occasionally the resource of going to the Poupins’, or of gossiping and smoking a pipe at some open house-door, when the night was not cold, with a fellow-mechanic. Later in the winter, after he had made Paul Muniment’s acquaintance, the aspect of his life changed considerably, though Millicent continued to be exceedingly mixed up with it. He hated the taste of liquor and still more the taste of the places where it was sold; besides which the types of misery and vice that one was liable to see collected in them frightened and harrowed him, made him ask himself questions that pierced the deeper because they were met by no answer. It was both a blessing and a drawback to him that the delicate, charming character of the work he did at Mr Crookenden’s, under Eustache Poupin’s influence, was a kind of education of the taste, trained him in the finest discriminations, in the perception of beauty and the hatred of ugliness. This made the brutal, garish, stodgy decoration of public-houses, with their deluge of gaslight, their glittering brass and pewter, their lumpish woodwork and false colours, detestable to him; he was still very young when the ‘gin-palace’ ceased to convey to him an idea of the palatial.