Page:The Princess Casamassima (London and New York, Macmillan & Co., 1886), Volume 2.djvu/84

 balanced against his smart neckties, a certain suspicious security that was perceived in him as to the h (he had had from his earliest years a natural command of it), and the fact that he possessed the sort of hand on which there is always a premium—an accident somehow to be guarded against in a thorough-going system of equality. He never challenged Poupin on the subject, for he owed the Frenchman too much to reproach him with any officious step that was meant in kindness; and moreover his fellow-labourer at old Crookenden's had said to him, as if to anticipate such an impugnment of his discretion, 'Remember, my child, that I am incapable of drawing aside any veil that you may have preferred to drop over your lacerated personality. Your moral dignity will always be safe with me. But remember at the same time that among the disinherited there is a mystic language which dispenses with proofs—a freemasonry, a reciprocal divination; they understand each other with half a word.' It was with half a word, then, in Bloomsbury, that Hyacinth had been understood; but there was a certain delicacy within him that forbade him to push his advantage, to treat implications of sympathy, none the less definite for being roundabout, as steps in the ladder of success. He had no wish to be a leader because his mother had murdered her lover and died in penal servitude: these circumstances recommended intentness but they also suggested modesty. When the gathering at the 'Sun and Moon' was at its best, and its temper seemed really an earnest of what was the basis of all its calculations—that the people was only a sleeping lion, already breathing shorter and beginning to stretch its limbs—at these hours, some of them thrilling enough, Hyacinth