“What do you mean—work for you?”
“You’ll bind all my books. I’ve ever so many foreign ones in paper.”
“You speak as if I had brought my tools!”
“No, I don’t imagine that. I’ll give you the wages now, and you can do the work, at your leisure and convenience, afterwards. Then if you want anything you can go over to Bonchester and buy it. There are very good shops; I’ve used them.” Hyacinth thought of a great many things at this juncture; she had that quickening effect on him. Among others he thought of these two: first that it was indelicate (though such an opinion was not very strongly held either in Pentonville or in Soho) to accept money from a woman; and second that it was still more indelicate to make such a woman as that go down on her knees to him. But it took more than a minute for one of these convictions to prevail over the other, and before that he had heard his friend continue in the tone of mild, disinterested argument: “If we believe in the coming democracy, if it seems to us right and just and we hold that in sweeping over the world the great wave will wash away a myriad iniquities and cruelties, why not make some attempt with our own poor means—for one must begin somewhere—to carry out the spirit of it in our lives and our manners? I want to do that. I try to do it—in my relations with you for instance. But you hang ridiculously back. You’re really not a bit democratic!”
Her accusing him of a patrician offishness was a very fine stroke; nevertheless it left him lucidity (though he still hesitated an instant, wondering if the words wouldn’t offend her) to say straightforwardly enough: “I’ve been strongly warned against you.”
The offence seemed not to touch her. “I can easily understand that. Of course my proceedings—though after all I’ve done little enough as yet—must appear most unnatural. Che vuole? as Madame Grandoni says.”
A certain knot of light blue ribbon which formed part of the trimming of her dress hung down at her side in the folds of it. On these glossy loops Hyacinth’s eyes happened for a moment to have rested, and he now took up one of them and carried it to his lips. “I’ll do all the work for you that you’ll give me. If you give it on purpose and by way of munificence that’s your own affair. I myself will estimate the price. What decides me is that I shall do the job so well; certainly it shall be better than any one else can do—so that if you employ me there will have been at least that reason. I’ve brought you a book—so you can see. I did it for you last year and went to South Street to give it to you, but you had already gone.”
“Give it to me to-morrow.” These words appeared to express so exclusively the calmness of relief at finding he could be reasonable, as well as a friendly desire to see the proof of his talent, that he was surprised when in the next breath she said irrelevantly: “Who was it warned you against me?”
He feared she might suppose he meant Madame Grandoni, so he made the plainest answer, having no desire to betray the old lady and reflecting how, as the likelihood was small that his friend in Camberwell would ever consent to meet the Princess (in spite of her plan of going there) no one would be hurt by it. “A friend of mine in London—Paul Muniment.”
“Paul Muniment?”