Page:The Princess Casamassima (London and New York, Macmillan & Co., 1886), Volume 3.djvu/132

 those who associated with her. He followed her movements, but plainly he didn't follow her calculations, so that he could only listen more attentively when she inquired suddenly, 'Do you know why I asked you to come and see me? Do you know why I went to see your sister? It was all a plan,' said the Princess.

'We hoped it was just an ordinary humane, social impulse,' the young man returned.

'It was humane, it was even social, but it was not ordinary. I wanted to save Hyacinth.'

'To save him?'

'I wanted to be able to talk with you just as I am talking now.'

'That was a fine idea!' Muniment exclaimed, ingenuously.

'I have an exceeding, a quite inexpressible, regard for him. I have no patience with some of his opinions, and that is why I permitted myself to say just now that he is silly. But, after all, the opinions of our friends are not what we love them for, and therefore I don't see why they should be what we hate them for. Hyacinth Robinson's nature is singularly generous and his intelligence very fine, though there are some things that he muddles up. You just now expressed strongly your own regard for him; therefore we ought to be perfectly agreed. Agreed, I mean, about getting him out of his scrape.'

Muniment had the air of a man who felt that he must consider a little before he assented to these successive propositions; it being a limitation of his intellect that he could not respond without understanding. After a moment he answered, referring to the Princess's last remark, in