Page:The Princess Casamassima (London and New York, Macmillan & Co., 1886), Volume 2.djvu/190

 now so improved what fresh arrangement could one come to with the very humble, which was in its nature uncompromising? Though the spring was far advanced the day was a dark drizzle, and the room had the clamminess of a finished use, an ooze of dampness from the muddy street, where the areas were a narrow slit. No wonder Pinnie had felt it at last, and her small under-fed organism had grown numb and ceased to act. At the thought of her limited, stinted life, the patient, humdrum effort of her needle and scissors, which had ended only in a show-room where there was nothing to show and a pensive reference to the cut of sleeves no longer worn, the tears again rose to his eyes; but he brushed them aside when he heard a cautious tinkle at the house-door, which was presently opened by the little besmirched slavey retained for the service of the solitary lodger—a domestic easily bewildered, who had a squint and distressed Hyacinth by wearing shoes that didn't match, though they were of an equal antiquity and resembled each other in the facility with which they dropped off. Hyacinth had not heard Mr. Vetch's voice in the hall, apparently because he spoke in a whisper; but the young man was not surprised when, taking every precaution not to make the door creak, he came into the parlour. The fiddler said nothing to him at first; the two men only looked at each other for a long minute. Hyacinth saw what he most wanted to know—whether he knew the worst about Pinnie; but what was further in his eyes (they had an expression considerably different from any he had hitherto seen in them), defined itself to our hero only little by little.

'Don't you think you might have written me a word?'