Page:The Princess Casamassima (London and New York, Macmillan & Co., 1886), Volume 2.djvu/200

 way his shirts could be done up would still not be good enough. Poupin had seen Godfrey Sholto at the 'Sun and Moon,' and it had come to him, through Hyacinth, that there was a remarkable feminine influence in the Captain's life, mixed up in some way with his presence in Bloomsbury—an influence, moreover, by which Hyacinth himself, for good or for evil, was in peril of being touched. Sholto was the young man's visible link with a society for which Lisson Grove could have no importance in the scheme of the universe but as a short cut (too disagreeable to be frequently used) out of Bayswater; therefore if Hyacinth left town with a new hat and a pair of kid gloves it must have been to move in the direction of that superior circle and in some degree, at least, at the solicitation of the before-mentioned feminine influence. So much as this the Frenchman suggested, explicitly enough, as his manner was, to the old fiddler; but his talk had a flavour of other references which excited Mr. Vetch's curiosity much more than they satisfied it. They were obscure; they evidently were painful to the speaker; they were confused and embarrassed and totally wanting in the luminosity which usually characterised the lightest allusions of M. Poupin. It was the fiddler's fancy that his friend had something on his mind which he was not at liberty to impart, and that it related to Hyacinth and might, for those who took an interest in the singular lad, constitute a considerable anxiety. Mr. Vetch, on his own part, nursed this anxiety into a tolerably definite shape: he persuaded himself that the Frenchman had been leading the boy too far in the line of social criticism, had given him a push on some crooked path where a slip would be a likely accident. When on a subsequent occasion, with Poupin,