Page:The Princess Casamassima (London and New York, Macmillan & Co., 1886), Volume 1.djvu/122

 said M. Poupin. 'It isn't good to eat, and we don't do it for our amusement. It's terribly serious, my child.'

'It's a kind of society, to which he and I and a good many others belong. There is no harm in telling him that,' the young man went on.

'I advise you not to tell it to Mademoiselle; she is quite in the old ideas,' Madame Poupin suggested to Hyacinth, tasting her tisane.

Hyacinth sat baffled and wondering, looking from his fellow-labourer in Soho to his new acquaintance opposite. 'If you have some plan, something to which one can give one's self, I think you might have told me,' he remarked, in a moment, to Poupin.

The latter merely gazed at him a while; then he said to the strange young man, 'He is a little jealous of you. But there is no harm in that; it's of his age. You must know him, you must like him. We will tell you his history some other day; it will make you feel that he belongs to us in fact. It is an accident that he hasn't met you here before.'

'How could ces messieurs have met, when M. Paul never comes? He doesn't spoil us!' Madame Poupin cried.

'Well, you see I have my little sister at home to take care of, when I ain't at the shop,' M. Paul explained. 'This afternoon it was just a chance; there was a lady we know came in to sit with her.'

'A lady—a real lady?'

'Oh yes, every inch,' said M. Paul, laughing.

'Do you like them to thrust themselves into your apartment like that, because you have the désagrément of being poor? It seems to be the custom in this country, but it wouldn't suit me at all,' Madame Poupin continued. 'I