Page:The Princess Casamassima (London and New York, Macmillan & Co., 1886), Volume 1.djvu/41

 pipe, with his head thrown back on the high, stiff, oldfashioned sofa, and his little legs crossed under him like a Turk's. 'It's true you have done a good deal for him. You are a good little woman, my dear Pinnic, after all.' He said 'after all,' because that was a part of his tone. In reality he had never had a moment's doubt that she was the best little woman in the north of London.

'I have done what I could, and I don't want no fuss made about it. Only it does make a difference when you come to look at it—about taking him off to see another woman. And such another woman—and in such a place! I think it's hardly right to take an innocent child.'

'I don't know about that; there are people that would tell you it would do him good. If he didn't like the place as a child, he would take more care to keep out of it later.'

'Lord, Mr. Vetch, how can you think? And him such a perfect little gentleman!' Miss Pynsent cried.

'Is it you that have made him one?' the fiddler asked. 'It doesn't run in the family, you'd say.'

'Family? what do you know about that?' she replied, quickly, catching at her dearest, her only hobby.

'Yes, indeed, what does any one know? what did she know herself?' And then Miss Pynsent's visitor added, irrelevantly, 'Why should you have taken him on your back? Why did you want to be so good? No one else thinks it necessary.'

'I didn't want to be good. That is, I do want to, of course, in a general way: but that wasn't the reason then. But I had nothing of my own—I had nothing in the world but my thimble.'