Page:The Princess Casamassima (London and New York, Macmillan & Co., 1886), Volume 2.djvu/57

 her pain, of letting Hyacinth know that he was appreciated, admired and, for those 'charming manners' commended by Lady Aurora, even wondered at; and this kind of interest always appeared to imply a suspicion of his secret—something which, when he expressed to himself the sense of it, he called, resenting it at once and yet finding a certain softness in it, 'a beastly attendrissement.' When Pinnie went on to say to him that Lady Aurora appeared to feel a certain surprise at his never yet having come to Belgrave Square for the famous books, he reflected that he must really wait upon her without more delay, if he wished to keep up his reputation for charming manners; and meanwhile he considered much the extreme oddity of this new phase of his life (it had opened so suddenly, from one day to the other); a phase in which his society should have become indispensable to ladies of high rank and the obscurity of his condition only an attraction the more. They were taking him up then, one after the other, and they were even taking up poor Pinnie, as a means of getting at him so that he wondered, with humorous bitterness, whether it meant that his destiny was really seeking him out—that the aristocracy, recognising a mysterious affinity (with that fineness of flair for which they were remarkable), were coming to him to save him the trouble of coming to them.

It was late in the day (the beginning of an October evening), and Lady Aurora was at home. Hyacinth had made a mental calculation of the time at which she would have risen from dinner; the operation of 'rising from dinner' having always been, in his imagination, for some reason or other, highly characteristic of the nobility. He