Page:The Princess Casamassima (London and New York, Macmillan & Co., 1886), Volume 1.djvu/62

 'Is there nothing the little gentleman would like to say, now, to the unfortunate? Hasn't he any pleasant remark to make to her about his coming so far to see her when she's so sunk? It isn't often that children are shown over the place (as the little man has been), and there's many that would think they were lucky if they could see what he has seen.'

'Mon pauvre joujou, mon pauvre chéri,' the prisoner went on, in her tender, tragic whisper.

'He only wants to be very good; he always sits that way at home,' said Miss Pynsent, alarmed at Mrs. Bowerbank's address and hoping there wouldn't be a scene.

'He might have stayed at home then—with this wretched person moaning after him,' Mrs. Bowerbank remarked, with some sternness. She plainly felt that the occasion threatened to be wanting in brilliancy, and wished to intimate that though she was to be trusted for discipline, she thought they were all getting off too easily.

'I came because Pinnie brought me,' Hyacinth declared, from his low perch. 'I thought at first it would be pleasant. But it ain't pleasant—I don't like prisons.' And he placed his little feet on the cross-piece of the stool, as if to touch the institution at as few points as possible.

The woman in bed continued her strange, almost whining plaint. Il ne veut pas s'approcher, il a honte de moi.

'There's a many that begin like that!' laughed Mrs. Bowerbank, who was irritated by the boy's contempt for one of her Majesty's finest establishments.

Hyacinth's little white face exhibited no confusion; he only turned it to the prisoner again, and Miss Pynsent felt that some extraordinary dumb exchange of meanings was