Page:The Princess Casamassima (London and New York, Macmillan & Co., 1886), Volume 3.djvu/50

 spirit; it was like the touch of a hand at once very firm and very soft, but strangely cold.

'I don't want in the least to throw the business up, but did you suppose I liked it?' Hyacinth asked, with rather a forced laugh.

'My dear fellow, how could I tell? You like a lot of things I don't. You like excitement and emotion and change, you like remarkable sensations, whereas I go in for a holy calm, for sweet repose.'

'If you object, for yourself, to change, and are so fond of still waters, why have you associated yourself with a revolutionary movement?' Hyacinth demanded, with a little air of making rather a good point.

'Just for that reason!' Muniment answered, with a smile. 'Isn't our revolutionary movement as quiet as the grave? Who knows, who suspects, anything like the full extent of it?'

'I see—you take only the quiet parts!'

In speaking these words Hyacinth had had no derisive intention, but a moment later he flushed with the sense that they had a sufficiently petty sound. Muniment, however, appeared to see no offence in them, and it was in the gentlest, most suggestive way, as if he had been thinking over what might comfort his comrade, that he replied, 'There's one thing you ought to remember—that it's quite on the cards it may never come off.'

'I don't desire that reminder,' Hyacinth said; 'and, moreover, you must let me say that, somehow, I don't easily fancy you mixed up with things that don't come off. Anything you have to do with will come off, I think.'

Muniment reflected a moment, as if his little companion