“I thought it would do him good,” said the old man simply and rather wearily.
“Well, I daresay it has,” she returned with the manner of wishing to encourage him.
“I don’t know what was in my head. I wanted him to quarrel with society. Now I want him to be reconciled to it,” Mr. Vetch remarked earnestly. He appeared to desire her to understand how great a point he made of this.
“Ah, but he is!” she immediately said. “We often talk about that; he’s not like me, who see all kinds of abominations. He’s a bloated little aristocrat. What more would you have?”
“Those are not the opinions he expresses to me”—and Mr. Vetch shook his head sadly. “I’m greatly distressed and I don’t make out——! I’ve not come here with the presumptuous wish to cross-examine you, but I should like very much to know if I am wrong in believing that he has gone about with you in the bad quarters—in Saint Giles’s and Whitechapel.”
“We’ve certainly inquired and explored together,” the Princess admitted, “and in the depths of this huge, luxurious, wanton, wasteful city we’ve seen sights of unspeakable misery and horror. But we’ve been not only in the slums; we’ve been to a music hall and a penny-reading.”
The fiddler received this information at first in silence, so that his hostess went on to mention some of the phases of life they had observed; describing with great vividness, but at the same time with a kind of argumentative moderation, several scenes which did little honour to “our boasted civilisation.” “What wonder is it then that he should tell me things can’t go on any longer as they are?” he asked when she had finished. “He said only the other day that he should regard himself as one of the most contemptible of human beings if he should do nothing to alter them, to better them.”
“What wonder indeed? But if he said that he was in one of his bad days,” the Princess replied. “He changes constantly and his impressions change. The misery of the people is by no means always on his heart. You tell me what he has told you; well, he has told me that the people may perish over and over rather than the conquests of civilisation shall be sacrificed to them. He declares at such moments that they’ll be sacrificed—sacrificed utterly—if the ignorant masses get the upper hand.”
“He needn’t be afraid. That will never happen.”
“I don’t know. We can at least try,” she said.