“Well, I’m very confiding,” said Millicent Henning. Then she asked what had become of Mr. Vetch. “We used to say that if Miss Pynsent was your mamma he was your papa. In our family we used to call him Miss Pynsent’s young man.”
“He’s her young man still,” Hyacinth returned. “He’s our best friend—or supposed to be. He got me the place I’m in now. He lives by his fiddle, as he used to do.”
Millicent looked a little at her companion, after which she observed, “I should have thought he would have got you a place at his theatre.”
“At his theatre? That would have been no use. I don’t play any instrument.”
“I don’t mean in the orchestra, you gaby! You’d look very nice in a fancy costume.” She had her elbows on the table and her shoulders lifted, an attitude of extreme familiarity. He was on the point of replying that he didn’t care for fancy costumes, he wished to go through life in his own character; but he checked himself with the reflexion that this was exactly what he was apparently destined not to do. His own character? He was to cover that up as carefully as possible; he was to go through life in a mask, in a borrowed mantle; he was to be every day and every hour an actor. Suddenly and with the utmost irrelevance Miss Henning inquired: “Is Miss Pynsent some relation? What gave her any right over you?”
Hyacinth had an answer ready for this question; he had determined to say as he had several times said before: “Miss Pynsent’s an old friend of my family. My mother was very fond of her and she was very fond of my mother.” He repeated the formula now, looking at the girl with the same inscrutable calmness, as he fancied; though a remark more to his taste would have been that his mother was none of her business. But she was too handsome for such risks, and she presented her large fair face to him across the table with an air of solicitation to be cosy and comfortable. There were things in his heart and a torment and a hidden passion in his life which he should be glad enough to lay open to some woman. He believed that perhaps this would be the cure ultimately; that in return for something he might drop, syllable by syllable, into some listening ear that would be attached to some kissable cheek, certain other words would be spoken to him which would make his pain for ever less sharp. But what woman could he trust, what ear would be both safe and happily enough attached? How much didn’t he already ask? The answer was not in this loud fresh laughing creature, whose sympathy couldn’t have the fineness he was looking for, since her curiosity was vulgar. Hyacinth objected to the vulgar as much as Miss Pynsent herself; in this respect she had long since discovered that he was after her own heart. He had not at any rate now taken up the subject of Mrs. Henning’s death; he felt himself incapable of researches into that lady and had no desire for knowledge of Millicent’s relationships. Moreover he always suffered, to sickness, when people began to hover about the question of his origin, the reasons why Pinnie had had the care of him from a baby. Mrs. Henning had been repulsive, but at least her daughter could speak of her. “Mr. Vetch has changed his lodgings: he moved out of 17 three years ago,” he said, to vary the topic. “He couldn’t stand the other people in the house; there was a man who played the accordeon.”
Millicent, however, was but moderately interested in this anecdote, though wanting to know why people should like Mr. Vetch’s fiddle any better. Then she added: “And I think that while he was about it he might have put you into something better than a bookbinder’s.”
“He wasn’t obliged to put me into anything. It’s a very good place.”
“All the same, it isn’t where I should have looked to find you,” the girl declared, not so much in the tone of wishing to offer him tribute as of resentment at having miscalculated.
“Where should you have looked to find me? In the House of Commons? It’s a pity you couldn’t have told me in advance what you would have liked me to be.”