Her mirth was contagious; it gave Hyacinth the audacity to say to her, “I would trust _you_, if you did!” though he felt, the next minute, that this was even a more familiar speech than if he had said he wouldn’t trust her. “It comes, then, to the same thing,” the Princess went on. “She would not show herself with me in public if I were not respectable. If you knew more about me you would understand what has led me to turn my attention to the great social question. It is a long story, and the details wouldn’t interest you; but perhaps some day, if we have more talk, you will put yourself a little in my place. I am very serious, you know; I am not amusing myself with peeping and running away. I am convinced that we are living in a fool’s paradise, that the ground is heaving under our feet.” “It’s not the ground, my dear; it’s you that are turning somersaults,” Madame Grandoni interposed. “Ah, you, my friend, you have the happy faculty of believing what you like to believe. I have to believe what I see.” “She wishes to throw herself into the revolution, to guide it, to enlighten it,” Madame Grandoni said to Hyacinth, speaking now with imperturbable gravity. “I am sure she could direct it in any sense she would wish!” the young man responded, in a glow. The pure, high dignity with which the Princess had just spoken, and which appeared to cover a suppressed tremor of passion, set Hyacinth’s pulses throbbing, and though he scarcely saw what she meant—her aspirations seeming so vague—her tone, her voice, her wonderful face, showed that she had a generous soul. She answered his eager declaration with a serious smile and a melancholy head-shake. “I have no such pretensions, and my good old friend is laughing at me. Of course that is very easy; for what, in fact, can be more absurd, on the face of it, than for a woman with a title, with diamonds, with a carriage, with servants, with a position, as they call it, to sympathise with the upward struggles of those who are below? ‘Give all that up, and we’ll believe you,’ you have a right to say. I am ready to give them up the moment it will help the cause; I assure you that’s the least difficulty. I don’t want to teach, I want to learn; and, above all, I want to know _à quoi m’en tenir_. Are we on the eve of great changes, or are we not? Is everything that is gathering force, underground, in the dark, in the night, in little hidden rooms, out of sight of governments and policemen and idiotic ‘statesmen’—heaven save them!—is all this going to burst forth some fine morning and set the world on fire? Or is it to sputter out and spend itself in vain conspiracies, be dissipated in sterile heroisms and abortive isolated movements? I want to know _à quoi m’en tenir_,” she repeated, fixing her visitor with more brilliant eyes, as if he could tell her on the spot. Then, suddenly, she added in a totally different tone, “Excuse me, I have an idea you speak French. Didn’t Captain Sholto tell me so?”