“I assure you I will, if you say you believe it’s the only right.” “Do I often say anything so asinine? Right—right? what have you to do with that? If you want the only right, you are very particular.” “Please, then, what am I to go by?” the dressmaker asked, bewildered. “You are to go by this, by what will take the youngster down.” “Take him down, my poor little pet?” “Your poor little pet thinks himself the flower of creation. I don’t say there is any harm in that: a fine, blooming, odoriferous conceit is a natural appendage of youth and cleverness. I don’t say there is any great harm in it, but if you want a guide as to how you are to treat a boy, that’s as good a guide as any other.” “You want me to arrange the interview, then?” “I don’t want you to do anything but give me another sip of brandy. I just say this: that I think it’s a great gain, early in life, to know the worst; then we don’t live in a fool’s paradise. I did that till I was nearly forty; then I woke up and found I was in Lomax Place.” Whenever Mr Vetch said anything that could be construed as a reference to a former position which had had elements of distinction, Miss Pynsent observed a respectful, a tasteful, silence, and that is why she did not challenge him now, though she wanted very much to say that Hyacinth was no more ‘presumptuous’ (that was the term she should have used) than he had reason to be, with his genteel figure and his wonderful intelligence; and that as for thinking himself a ‘flower’ of any kind, he knew but too well that he lived in a small black-faced house, miles away from the West End, rented by a poor little woman who took lodgers, and who, as they were of such a class that they were not always to be depended upon to settle her weekly account, had a strain to make two ends meet, in spite of the sign between her windows— MISS AMANDA PYNSENT. _Modes et Robes_. DRESSMAKING IN ALL ITS BRANCHES. COURT-DRESSES, MANTLES AND FASHIONABLE BONNETS. Singularly enough, her companion, before she had permitted herself to interpose, took up her own thought (in one of its parts) and remarked that perhaps she would say of the child that he was, so far as his actual circumstances were concerned, low enough down in the world, without one’s wanting him to be any lower. “But by the time he’s twenty, he’ll persuade himself that Lomax Place was a bad dream, that your lodgers and your dressmaking were as imaginary as they are vulgar, and that when an old friend came to see you late at night it was not your amiable practice to make him a glass of brandy and water. He’ll teach himself to forget all this: he’ll have a way.” “Do you mean he’ll forget _me_, he’ll deny me?” cried Miss Pynsent, stopping the movement of her needle, short off, for the first time.