“Their work?”
“The people’s.”
“Ah you call me fantastic names, but I’m one of them myself!” he cried.
“I know what you’re going to say,” the Princess broke in. “You’re going to say it will help them to do what you do—to do their work themselves and earn their wages. That’s beautiful so far as it goes. But what do you propose for the thousands and hundreds of thousands for whom no work—on the overcrowded earth, under the pitiless heaven—is to be found? There’s less and less work in the world, and there are more and more people to do the little there is. The old ferocious selfishness must come down. They won’t come down gracefully, so they must just be assisted.”
The tone in which she spoke made his heart beat fast, and there was something so inspiring in the great union of her beauty, her sincerity and her energy that the image of a heroism not less great flashed up again before him in all the splendour it had lost—the idea of a tremendous risk and an unregarded sacrifice. Such a woman as that, at such an hour, one who could shine like silver and ring like crystal, made every scruple a poor prudence and every compunction a cowardice. “I wish to God I could see it as you see it!” he wailed after he had looked at her some seconds in silent admiration.
“I see simply this: that what we’re doing is at least worth trying, and that as none of those who have the power, the place, the means, will bethink themselves of anything else, on their head be the responsibility, on their head be the blood!”
“Princess,” said Hyacinth, clasping his hands and feeling that he trembled, “dearest Princess, if anything should happen to you——!” But his voice fell; the horror of it, a dozen hideous images of her possible perversity and her possible punishment were again before him, as he had already seen them in sinister musings: they seemed to him worse than anything he had imagined for himself.
She threw back her head, looking at him almost in anger. “To me! And pray why not to me? What title have I to exemption, to security, more than any one else? Why am I so sacrosanct and so precious?”
“Simply because there’s no one in the world and has never been any one in the world like you.”
“Oh thank you!” said the Princess impatiently. And she turned from him as with a beat of great white wings that raised her straight out of the bad air of the personal. It took her up too high, it put an end to their talk; expressing an indifference to what it might interest him to think of her to-day, and even a contempt for it, which brought tears to his eyes. His tears, however, were concealed by the fact that he bent his head low over the hand he had taken to kiss; after which he left the room without looking at her.