Page:The Princess Casamassima (London and New York, Macmillan & Co., 1886), Volume 3.djvu/216

 ; an unwarrantable supposition, in spite of Hyacinth's having seen them, less than an hour before, fall so much below their own standard. With this suspicion there rushed into Hyacinth's mind an intense determination to dissemble before his visitor to the last: he might imagine what he liked, but he should not have a grain of satisfaction—or rather he should have that of being led to believe, if possible, that his suspicions were positively vain and idle. Hyacinth rested his eyes on the books that Mr. Vetch had taken down from the shelf, and admitted that they were very pretty work and that so long as one didn't become blind or maimed the ability to produce that sort of thing was a legitimate source of confidence. Then suddenly, as they continued simply to look at each other, the pressure of the old man's curiosity, the expression of his probing, beseeching eyes, which had become strange and tragic in these latter times and completely changed their character, grew so intolerable that to defend himself Hyacinth took the aggressive and asked him boldly whether it were simply to look at his work, of which he had half a dozen specimens in Lomax Place, that he had made a nocturnal pilgrimage. 'My dear old friend, you have something on your mind—some fantastic fear, some extremely erroneous idée fixe. Why has it taken you to-night, in particular? Whatever it is, it has brought you here, at an unnatural hour, you don't know why. I ought of course to be thankful to anything that brings you here; and so I am, in so far as that it makes me happy. But I can't like it if makes you miserable. You're like a nervous mother whose baby's in bed upstairs; she goes up every five minutes to see if he's all right—if he isn't uncovered or hasn't tumbled out of bed. Dear Mr.