“Well now, tell me what you thought of our friend the Princess,” the Captain said, thrusting out the loose yellow slippers his servant had helped to exchange for his shoes. He spoke as if he had been waiting impatiently for the proper moment to ask that question, so much might depend on the answer.
“She’s beautiful—beautiful,” Hyacinth answered almost dreamily while his eyes wandered all over the room.
“She was so interested in all you said to her; she’d like so much to see you again. She means to write to you—I suppose she can address to the ‘Sun and Moon’?—and I hope you’ll go to her house if she proposes a day.”
“I don’t know—I don’t know. It seems so strange.”
“What seems strange, my dear chap?”
“Everything! My sitting here with you; my introduction to that lady; the idea of her wanting, as you say, to see me again and of her writing to me; and this whole place of yours, with all its dim rich curiosities hanging on the walls and glinting in the light of that rose-coloured lamp. You yourself too—you’re strangest of all.”
The Captain looked at him so silently and so fixedly, through the fumes of their tobacco, after he had made this last charge that Hyacinth thought he was perhaps offended; but this impression was presently dissipated by further signs of sociability and hospitality, and Sholto took occasion later to let him know how important it was, in the days they were living in, not to have too small a measure of the usual, destined as they certainly were—“in the whole matter of the relations of class with class and all that sort of thing, you know”—to witness some very startling developments. The Captain spoke as if, for his part, he were a child of his age (so that he only wanted to see all it could show him) down to the points of his yellow slippers. Hyacinth felt that he himself had not been very satisfactory about the Princess; but as his nerves began to tremble a little more into tune with the situation he repeated to his host what Milly had said about her at the theatre—asked if this young lady had correctly understood him in believing she had been turned out of the house by her husband.
“Yes, he literally pushed her into the street—or into the garden; I believe the scene took place in the country. But perhaps Miss Henning didn’t mention, or perhaps I didn’t, that the Prince would at the present hour give everything he owns in the world to get her back. Fancy such an absurd scene!” said the Captain, laughing in a manner that struck Hyacinth as rather profane.
He stared with dilated eyes at this picture, which seemed to demand a comparison with the only incident of the sort that had come within his experience—the forcible ejection of intoxicated females from public-houses. “That magnificent being—what had she done?”
“Oh, she had made him feel he was an ass!” the Captain answered promptly. He turned the conversation to Miss Henning; said he was so glad Hyacinth gave him an opportunity to speak of her. He got on with her famously; perhaps she had told him. They became immense friends—en tout bien tout honneur, s’entend. Now, there was another London type, plebeian but brilliant; and how little justice one usually did it, how magnificent it was! But she of course was a wonderful specimen. “My dear fellow, I’ve seen many women, and the women of many countries,” the Captain went on, “and I’ve seen them as intimately as you like, and I know what I’m talking about; and when I tell you that that one—that one—!” Then he suddenly paused, laughing in his democratic way. “But perhaps I’m going too far: you must always pull me up, you know, when I do. At any rate I congratulate you; I do right heartily. Have another cigar. Now what sort of—a—salary would she receive at her big shop, you know? I know where it is; I mean to go there and buy some pocket-handkerchiefs.”