“Yes, Assunta told me, and I was sorry to hear it.”
The Princess looked grave, as if her old friend’s departure had been indeed a very awkward affair. “You may imagine how I feel it! It leaves me completely alone; it makes, in the eyes of the world, an immense difference in my position. However, I don’t consider the eyes of the world. At any rate she couldn’t put up with me any more; it appears I’m more and more of a scandal—and it was written!” On Hyacinth’s asking what the old lady would do she said: “I suppose she’ll go and live with my husband. Funny, isn’t it? that it should have always to be with one of us and that it should matter so little which.” Five minutes later she inquired of him if the same reason he had mentioned just before was the explanation of his absence from Audley Court. Mr. Muniment had told her he hadn’t been near him and the sister for more than a month.
“No, it isn’t the fear of learning something that would make me uneasy: because somehow, in the first place, it isn’t natural to feel uneasy about Paul, and because in the second, if it were, he never lets one see anything—of any effect or impression on him. It’s simply the general sense of real divergence of view. When that divergence becomes sharp there are forms and lame pretences——”
“It’s best not to try to keep up? I see what you mean—when you’re grimly sincere. But you might go and see the sister.”
“I don’t like the sister,” Hyacinth frankly averred.
“Ah neither do I!” the Princess said; while her visitor remained conscious of the perfect composure, the absence of false shame, with which she had named their common friend. But she was silent after this, and he judged he had stayed long enough and sufficiently taxed a preoccupied attention. He got up and was bidding her good-night when she suddenly brought out: “By the way, your not going to see so good a friend as Mr. Muniment because you disapprove to-day of his work suggests to me that you’ll be in an awkward fix, with your disapprovals, the hour you’re called upon to serve the cause according to your vow.”
“Oh of course I’ve thought of that,” Hyacinth smiled.
“And would it be indiscreet to ask what you’ve thought?”
“Ah so many things, Princess! It would take me a long time to say.”
“I’ve never talked to you of this, because it seemed to me indelicate and the whole thing too much a secret of your own breast for even so intimate a friend as I’ve been to have a right to meddle with it. But I’ve wondered much, seeing you take all the while less and less interest—in the real business, I mean, less and less—how you’d reconcile your change of heart with your meeting your engagement. I pity you, my poor friend,” she went on with a noble benignity, “for I can imagine nothing more terrible than to find yourself face to face with your obligation and to feel at the same time the spirit originally prompting it dead within you.”