Page:The Princess Casamassima (London and New York, Macmillan & Co., 1886), Volume 1.djvu/149

 feel this; she pronounced it as if she were distributing prizes for a high degree of it. No doubt the tipsy inventor and the regal laundress had been fine specimens, but that didn't diminish the merit of their highly original offspring. The girl's insistence upon her mother's virtues (even now that her age had become more definite to him he thought of her as a girl) touched in his heart a chord that was always ready to throb—the chord of melancholy, bitter, aimless wonder as to the difference it would have made in his spirit if there had been some pure, honourable figure like that to shed her influence over it.

'Are you very fond of your brother?' he inquired, after a little.

The eyes of his hostess glittered at him for a moment. 'If you ever quarrel with him, you'll see whose side I'll take.'

'Ah, before that I shall make you like me.'

'That's very possible, and you'll see how I'll fling you over!'

'Why, then, do you object so to his views—his ideas about the way the people will come up?'

'Because I think he'll get over them.'

'Never—never!' cried Hyacinth. 'I have only known him an hour or two, but I deny that, with all my strength.'

'Is that the way you are going to make me like you—contradicting me so?' Miss Muniment inquired, with familiar archness.

'What's the use, when you tell me I shall be sacrificed? One might as well perish for a lamb as for a sheep.'

'I don't believe you're a lamb at all. Certainly you are not, if you want all the great people pulled down, and the most dreadful scenes enacted.'