“Hullo, I didn’t know you were so advanced!” exclaimed the master of the scene, who had been sitting silent and sidewise in a chair that was too narrow for him, his big arm hugging the back. “Have we been entertaining an angel unawares?”
Hyacinth made out he was chaffing him, but he knew the way to face that sort of thing was to exaggerate one’s meaning. “You didn’t know I was advanced? Why, I thought that was the principal thing about me. I think I go about as far as any one.”
“I thought the principal thing about you was that you knew French,” Paul Muniment said with an air of derision which showed him he wouldn’t put that ridicule upon him unless he liked him, at the same time that it revealed to him how he had come within an ace of posturing.
“Well, I don’t know it for nothing. I’ll say something that will take your head off if you don’t look out—just the sort of thing they say so well in French.”
“Oh, do say something of that kind; we should enjoy it so much!” cried Rosy in perfect good faith and clasping her hands for expectation.
The appeal was embarrassing, but Hyacinth was saved from the consequences of it by a remark from Lady Aurora, who quavered out the words after two or three false starts, appearing to address him, now that she spoke to him directly, with a sort of overdone consideration. “I should like so very much to know—it would be so interesting—if you don’t mind—how far exactly you do go.” She threw back her head very far and thrust her shoulders forward, and if her chin had been more adapted to such a purpose would have appeared to point it at him.
This challenge was hardly less alarming than the other, for he was far from being ready with an impressive formula. He replied, however, with a candour in which he tried as far as possible to sink his vagueness: “Well, I’m very strong indeed. I think I see my way to conclusions from which even Monsieur and Madame Poupin would shrink. Poupin, at any rate; I’m not so sure about his wife.”
“I should like so much to know Madame,” Lady Aurora murmured as if politeness demanded that she should content herself with this answer.
“Oh, Puppin isn’t strong,” said Muniment; “you can easily look over his head! He has a sweet assortment of phrases—they’re really pretty things to hear, some of them; but he hasn’t had a new idea these thirty years. It’s the old stock that has been withering in the window. All the same he warms one up; he has a spark of the sacred fire. The principal conclusion Mr. Robinson sees his way to,” he added to Lady Aurora, “is that your father ought to have his head chopped off and carried on a pike.”
“Ah yes, the French Revolution.”