“When he’s out with me he pretends he can’t abide them houses,” Miss Henning declared. “I wish I had looked in that one to see who was there.”
“Well, she’s rather nice,” the Captain went on. “She told me her name was Georgiana.”
“I went to get a piece of money changed,” Hyacinth said with the sense of a certain dishonesty in the air and glad he at least could afford to speak the truth.
“To get your grandmother’s nightcap changed! I recommend you to keep your money together—you’ve none too much of it!” Millicent exclaimed.
“Is that the reason you’re playing me false?” Hyacinth flashed out. He had been thinking with still intentness as they walked; at once nursing and strangling a kindled suspicion. He was pale with the idea that he had been bamboozled, yet was able to say to himself that one must allow in life, thank goodness, for the element of coincidence, and that he might easily put himself immensely in the wrong by making a groundless charge. It was only later that he pieced his impressions together and saw them—as it appeared—justify each other; at present, as soon as he had uttered it, he was almost ashamed of his quick retort to Millicent’s taunt. He ought at least to have waited to see what Curzon Street would bring forth.
The girl broke out on him immediately, repeating “False, false?” with high derision and wanting to know whether that was the way to knock a lady about in public. She had stopped short on the edge of a crossing and she went on with a voice so uplifted that he was glad they were in a street apt to be empty at such an hour: “You’re a pretty one to talk about falsity when a woman has only to leer at you out of an opera-box!”
“Don’t say anything about her,” the young man interposed, trembling.
“And pray why not about ‘her,’ I should like to know? You don’t pretend she’s a decent woman, I suppose?” Millicent’s laughter rang through the quiet neighbourhood.
“My dear fellow, you know you have been to her,” Captain Sholto wonderfully smiled.
Hyacinth turned on him staring and at once provoked and baffled by his ambiguous part in an incident it was doubtless possible to magnify but not possible to treat as perfectly simple. “Certainly I’ve been to the Princess Casamassima, thanks to you. When you came and pressed me to go, when you dragged me, do you make it a reproach? Who the devil are you, anyway, and what do you want of me?” our hero cried—his mind flooded in a moment with everything in the Captain that had puzzled and worried and escaped him. This swelling tide obliterated on the spot everything that had beguiled.