Page:The Princess Casamassima (London and New York, Macmillan & Co., 1886), Volume 2.djvu/122

 into taking it by the owners, whom she had met somewhere and who had made up to her immensely, persuading her that she might really have it for nothing—for no more than she would give for the little honeysuckle cottage, the old parsonage embowered in clematis, which were really what she had been looking for. Besides it was one of those old musty mansions, ever so far from town, which it was always difficult to let, or to get a price for; and then it was a wretched house for living in. Hyacinth, for whom his three hours in the train had been a series of happy throbs, had not been struck with its geographical remoteness, and he asked the Princess what she meant, in such a connection, by using the word 'wretched.' To this she replied that the place was tumbling to pieces, inconvenient in every respect, full of ghosts and bad smells. 'That is the only reason I come to have it. I don't want you to think me more luxurious than I am, or that I throw away money. Never, never!' Hyacinth had no standard by which he could measure the importance his opinion would have for her, and he perceived that though she judged him as a creature still open to every initiation, whose naïveté would entertain her, it was also her fancy to treat him as an old friend, a person to whom she might have had the habit of referring her difficulties. Her performance of the part she had undertaken to play was certainly complete, and everything lay before him but the reason she had for playing it.

One of the gardens at Medley took the young man's heart beyond the others; it had high brick walls, on the sunny sides of which was a great training of apricots and plums, and straight walks, bordered with old-fashioned homely flowers, inclosing immense squares where other