Page:The Princess Casamassima (London and New York, Macmillan & Co., 1886), Volume 3.djvu/81

 Let civilisation come a little, first, and then we will talk about it. For the present, face to face with those horrors, I scorn it, I deny it!' And the Princess laughed ineffable things, like some splendid syren of the Revolution.

'The world is very sad and very hideous, and I am happy to say that I soon shall have done with it. But before I go I want to save Hyacinth. If he's a little aristocrat, as you say, there is so much the less fitness in his being ground in your mill. If he doesn't even believe in what he pretends to do, that's a pretty situation! What is he in for, madam? What devilish folly has he undertaken?'

'He is a strange mixture of contradictory impulses,' said the Princess, musingly. Then, as if calling herself back to the old man's question, she continued: 'How can I enter into his affairs with you? How can I tell you his secrets? In the first place, I don't know them, and if I did—fancy me!'

The fiddler gave a long, low sigh, almost a moan, of discouragement and perplexity. He had told the Princess that now he saw her he understood how Hyacinth should have become her slave, but he would not have been able to tell her that he understood her own motives and mysteries, that he embraced the immense anomaly of her behaviour. It came over him that she was incongruous and perverse, a more complicated form of the feminine character than any he had hitherto dealt with, and he felt helpless and baffled, foredoomed to failure. He had come prepared to flatter her without scruple, thinking that would be the clever, the efficacious, method of dealing with her; but he now had a sense that this primitive device had, though it was strange, no application to such a nature,