Page:The Princess Casamassima (London and New York, Macmillan & Co., 1886), Volume 3.djvu/174

 people of their beauty and cheapness. It had been a source of endless comfort to her, in her arduous evolution, that she herself never worked with her 'ands. Hyacinth answered her inquiries, as she had answered his own of old, by asking her what those people owed to the son of a person who had brought murder and mourning into their bright sublimities, and whether she thought he was very highly recommended to them. His question made her reflect for a moment; after which she returned, with the finest spirit, 'Well, if your position was so miserable, ain't that all the more reason they should give you a lift? Oh, it's something cruel!' she cried; and she added that in his place she would have found a way to bring herself under their notice. She wouldn't have drudged out her life in Soho if she had had gentlefolks' blood in her veins! 'If they had noticed you they would have liked you,' she was so good as to observe; but she immediately remembered, also, that in that case he would have been carried away quite over her head. She was not prepared to say that she would have given him up, little good as she had ever got of him. In that case he would have been thick with real swells, and she emphasised the 'real' by way of a thrust at the fine lady of Madeira Crescent—an artifice which was wasted, however, inasmuch as Hyacinth was sure she had extracted from Sholto a tolerably detailed history of the personage in question. Millicent was tender and tenderly sportive, and he was struck with the fact that his base birth really made little impression upon her; she accounted it an accident much less grave than he had been in the habit of doing. She was touched and moved; but what moved her was his story of his mother's dreadful revenge, her long imprisonment