Page:The Princess Casamassima (London and New York, Macmillan & Co., 1886), Volume 3.djvu/165

 . You'll know nothing about me then, for it will be all under your nose.'

'Well, there's nothing so pretty as nature,' Millicent observed, surveying the smutty sheep who find pasturage in the fields that extend from Knightsbridge to the Bayswater Road. 'What will you do when you're so bad you can't go to the shop?' she added, with a sudden transition. And when he asked why he should ever be so bad as that, she said she could see he was in a fever; she hadn't noticed it at first, because he never had had any more complexion than a cheese. Was it something he had caught in some of those back slums, where he went prying about with his wicked ideas? It served him right for taking as little good into such places as ever came out of them. Would his fine friends—a precious lot they were, that put it off on him to do all the nasty part!—would they find the doctor, and the port wine, and the money, and all the rest, when he was laid up—perhaps for months—through their putting such rot into his head and his putting it into others that could carry it even less? Millicent stopped on the grass, in the watery sunshine, and bent on her companion an eye in which he perceived, freshly, an awakened curiosity, a friendly, reckless ray, a pledge of substantial comradeship. Suddenly she exclaimed, quitting the tone of exaggerated derision which she had used a moment before, 'You little rascal, you've got something on your heart! Has your Princess given you the sack?'

'My poor girl, your talk is a queer mixture,' Hyacinth murmured. 'But it may well be. It is not queerer than my life.'

'Well, I'm glad you admit that!' the young woman cried, walking on with a flutter of her ribbons.