Page:The Princess Casamassima (London and New York, Macmillan & Co., 1886), Volume 3.djvu/166

 'Your ideas about my ideas!' Hyacinth continued. 'Yes, you should see me in the back slums. I'm a bigger Philistine than you, Miss Henning.'

'You've got more ridiculous names, if that's what you mean. I don't believe that half the time you know what you do mean, yourself. I don't believe you even know, with all your thinking, what you do think. That's your disease.'

'It's astonishing how you sometimes put your finger on the place,' Hyacinth rejoined. 'I mean to think no more—I mean to give it up. Avoid it yourself, my dear Millicent—avoid it as you would a baleful vice. It confers no true happiness. Let us live in the world of irreflective contemplation—let us live in the present hour.'

'I don't care how I live, nor where I live,' said Millicent, 'so long as I can do as I like. It's them that are over you—it's them that cut it fine! But you never were really satisfactory to me—not as one friend should be to another,' she pursued, reverting irresistibly to the concrete and turning still upon her companion that fine fairness which had no cause to shrink from a daylight exhibition. 'Do you remember that day I came back to Lomax Place ever so long ago, and called on poor dear Miss Pynsent (she couldn't abide me; she didn't like my form), and waited till you came in, and went out for a walk with you, and had tea at a coffee-shop? Well, I don't mind telling you that you weren't satisfactory to me then, and that I consider myself remarkably good-natured, ever since, to have kept you so little up to the mark. You always tried to carry it off as if you were telling one everything, and you never told one nothing at all.'

'What is it you want me to tell, my dear child?'