Page:The Princess Casamassima (London and New York, Macmillan & Co., 1886), Volume 1.djvu/221

 on. 'She would not show herself with me in public if I were not respectable. If you knew more about me you would understand what has led me to turn my attention to the great social question. It is a long story, and the details wouldn't interest you; but perhaps some day, if we have more talk, you will put yourself a little in my place. I am very serious, you know; I am not amusing myself with peeping and running away. I am convinced that we are living in a fool's paradise, that the ground is heaving under our feet.'

'It's not the ground, my dear; it's you that are turning somersaults,' Madame Grandoni interposed.

'Ah, you, my friend, you have the happy faculty of believing what you like to believe. I have to believe what I see.'

'She wishes to throw herself into the revolution, to guide it, to enlighten it,' Madame Grandoni said to Hyacinth, speaking now with imperturbable gravity.

'I am sure she could direct it in any sense she would wish!' the young man responded, in a glow. The pure, high dignity with which the Princess had just spoken, and which appeared to cover a suppressed tremor of passion, set Hyacinth's pulses throbbing, and though he scarcely saw what she meant—her aspirations seeming so vague—her tone, her voice, her wonderful face, showed that she had a generous soul.

She answered his eager declaration with a serious smile and a melancholy head-shake. 'I have no such pretensions, and my good old friend is laughing at me. Of course that is very easy; for what, in fact, can be more absurd, on the face of it, than for a woman with a title,