Page:The Princess Casamassima (London and New York, Macmillan & Co., 1886), Volume 3.djvu/175

 and his childish visit to the jail, with the later discovery of his peculiar footing in the world. These things produced a generous agitation—something the same in kind as the impressions she had occasionally derived from the perusal of the Family Herald. What affected her most, and what she came back to, was the whole element of Lord Frederick and the mystery of Hyacinth's having got so little good out of his affiliation to that nobleman. She couldn't get over his friends not having done something, though her imagination was still vague as to what they might have done. It was the queerest thing in the world, to Hyacinth, to find her apparently assuming that if he had not been so inefficient he might have 'worked' the whole dark episode as a source of distinction, of glory. She wouldn't have been a nobleman's daughter for nothing! Oh, the left hand was as good as the right; her respectability, for the moment, didn't care for that! His long silence was what most astonished her; it put her out of patience, and there was a strange candour in her wonderment at his not having bragged about his grand relations. They had become vivid and concrete to her now, in comparison with the timid shadows that Pinnie had set into spasmodic circulation. Millicent bumped about in the hushed past of her companion with the oddest mixture of sympathy and criticism, and with good intentions which had the effect of profane voices halloaing for echoes.

'Me only—me and her? Certainly, I ought to be obliged, even though it is late in the day. The first time you saw her I suppose you told her—that night you went into her box at the theatre, eh? She'd have worse to tell you, I'm sure, if she could ever bring herself to speak the