Page:The Princess Casamassima (London and New York, Macmillan & Co., 1886), Volume 3.djvu/79

 'That was my fault, that he ever learned it. I suppose he also told you that.'

'Yes, but I think he understood your idea. If you had the question to determine again, would you judge differently?'

'I thought it would do him good,' said the old man, simply and rather wearily.

'Well, I dare say it has,' the Princess rejoined, with the manner of wishing to encourage him.

'I don't know what was in my head. I wanted him to quarrel with society. Now I want him to be reconciled to it,' Mr. Vetch remarked, earnestly. He appeared to wish the Princess to understand that he made a great point of this.

'Ah, but he is!' she immediately returned. 'We often talk about that; he is not like me, who see all kinds of abominations. He's a tremendous aristocrat. What more would you have?'

'Those are not the opinions that he expresses to me,' said Mr. Vetch, shaking his head sadly. 'I am greatly distressed, and I don't understand. I have not come here with the presumptuous wish to cross-examine you, but I should like very much to know if I am wrong in believing that he has gone about with you in the bad quarters in St. Giles's and Whitechapel.'

'We have certainly inquired and explored together,' the Princess admitted, 'and in the depths of this huge, luxurious, wanton, wasteful city we have seen sights of unspeakable misery and horror. But we have been not only in the slums; we have been to a music hall and a penny-reading.'

The fiddler received this information at first in silence,