Page:The Princess Casamassima (London and New York, Macmillan & Co., 1886), Volume 2.djvu/161

 every detail of your behaviour, and I am more and more intriguée. You haven't a vulgar intonation, you haven't a common gesture, you never make a mistake, you do and say everything exactly in the right way. You come out of the hole you have described to me, and yet you might have stayed in country-houses all your life. You are much better than if you had! Jugez donc, from the way I talk to you! I have to make no allowances. I have seen Italians with that sort of natural tact and taste, but I didn't know one ever found it in any Anglo-Saxon in whom it hadn't been cultivated at a vast expense; unless, indeed, in certain little American women.'

'Do you mean I'm a gentleman?' asked Hyacinth, in a peculiar tone, looking out into the wet garden.

She hesitated, and then she said, 'It's I who make the mistakes!' Five minutes later she broke into an exclamation which touched him almost more than anything she had ever done, giving him the highest opinion of her delicacy and sympathy and putting him before himself as vividly as if the words were a little portrait. 'Fancy the strange, the bitter fate: to be constituted as you are constituted, to feel the capacity that you must feel, and yet to look at the good things of life only through the glass of the pastry-cook's window!'

'Every class has its pleasures,' Hyacinth rejoined, with perverse sententiousness, in spite of his emotion; but the remark didn't darken their mutual intelligence, and before they separated that evening he told her the things that had never yet passed his lips—the things to which he had awaked when he made Pinnie explain to him the visit to the prison. He told her, in a word, what he was.