“You confirm completely my first impression,” the Princess returned, smiling in a way that showed him he really amused her. “We shall discover the limits of your comprehension! I am atrociously nervous. But it will pass. How’s your cousin the dressmaker?” she inquired abruptly. And when Hyacinth had briefly given some account of poor Pinnie—described her as tolerably well for her, but old and tired and sad and not very successful—she exclaimed impatiently, “Ah, well, she’s not the only one!” and came back with irrelevance to the former question. “It’s not only my husband’s visit—absolutely unexpected!—that has made me fidgety, but the idea that now you’ve been so kind as to come here you may wonder why, after all, I made such a point of it, and even think any explanation I might be able to give you entirely insufficient.”
“I don’t want any explanation,” said Hyacinth with a sense of great presence of mind.
“It’s charming of you to say that, and I shall take you at your word. Explanations usually make things worse. All the same I don’t want you to think (as you might have done so easily the other evening) that I wish only to treat you as a curious animal.”
“I don’t care how you treat me!” he smiled.
There was a considerable silence, after which she pursued: “All I ask of my husband is to let me alone. But he won’t. He won’t return my indifference.”
Hyacinth wondered what reply he ought to make to such an announcement as that, and it seemed to him the least civility demanded was that he should say—as he could with such conviction—“It can’t be easy to be indifferent to you.”
“Why not if I’m odious? I can be—oh there’s no doubt of that! However, I can honestly say that with the Prince I’ve been exceedingly reasonable and that most of the wrongs—the big ones, those that settled the question—have been on his side. You may tell me of course that that’s the pretension of every woman who has made a mess of her marriage. But ask Madame Grandoni.”
“She’ll tell me it’s none of my business.”
“Very true—she might!” the Princess inconsequently laughed. “And I don’t know either why I should bore you with my domestic affairs; except that I’ve been wondering what I could do to show you confidence in return for your showing so much in me. As this matter of my separation from my husband happens to have been turned uppermost by his sudden descent on me I just mention it, though the subject’s tiresome enough. Moreover, I ought to let you know that I’ve very little respect for distinctions of class—the sort of thing they make so much of in this country. They’re doubtless convenient in some ways, but when one has a reason—a reason of feeling—for overstepping them, and one allows one’s self to be deterred by some dreary superstition about one’s place or some one else’s place, then I think it’s ignoble. It always belongs to one’s place not to be a poor creature. I take it that if you’re a socialist you think about this as I do; but lest by chance, as the sense of those differences is the English religion, it may have rubbed off even on you (though I’m more and more impressed with the fact that you’re scarcely more British than I am): lest you should in spite of your theoretic democracy be shocked at some of the applications that I, who cherish the creed, am capable of making of it, let me assure you without delay that in that case we shouldn’t get on together at all and had better part company before we go further.” She paused long enough for Hyacinth to declare with a great deal of emphasis that he wasn’t easily shocked; and then restlessly, eagerly, as if it relieved her to talk and made their queer conjunction less abnormal that she should talk most, she arrived at the point that she wanted to know the people, and know them intimately—the toilers and strugglers and sufferers—because she was convinced they were the most interesting portion of society, and at the question, “What could really be in worse taste than for me to carry into such an undertaking a pretension of greater delicacy and finer manners? If I must do that,” she continued, “it’s simpler to leave them alone. But I can’t leave them alone; they press on me, they haunt me, they fascinate me. There it is—after all it’s very simple: I want to know them and I want you to help me.”
“I’ll help you with pleasure to the best of my humble ability. But you’ll be awfully disappointed,” Hyacinth said. Very strange it seemed to him that within so few days two ladies of rank should have found occasion to express to him the same mysterious longing. A breeze from a thoroughly unexpected quarter was indeed blowing through the aristocracy. Nevertheless, though there was much of the same accent of passion in the Princess Casamassima’s communication that there had been in Lady Aurora’s, and though he felt bound to discourage his present interlocutress as he had done the other, the force that drove her struck him as a very different mixture from the shy, conscientious, anxious heresies of Rose Muniment’s friend. The temper varied in the two women as much as the aspect and the address, and that perhaps made their curiosity the more significant.