soon as he, and very likely it would be a part of the general initiation she had given him an impression of that she shouldn’t mind it so long as the tea was strong and the bread and butter thick. She described to him what had passed between Miss Pynsent and herself (she didn’t call her Pinnie, and he was glad, for he wouldn’t have liked it) before he came in, and let him know that she should never dare to come to the place again, as his mother would tear her eyes out. Then she checked herself. “Of course she ain’t your mother! How stupid I am! I keep forgetting.” Hyacinth had long since convinced himself that he had acquired a manner with which he could meet allusions of this kind: he had had, first and last, so many opportunities to practise it. Therefore he looked at his companion very steadily while he said, “My mother died many years ago; she was a great invalid. But Pinnie has been awfully good to me.” “My mother’s dead, too,” Miss Henning remarked. “She died very suddenly. I dare say you remember her in the Place.” Then, while Hyacinth disengaged from the past the wavering figure of Mrs Henning, of whom he mainly remembered that she used to strike him as dirty, the girl added, smiling, but with more sentiment, “But I have had no Pinnie.” “You look as if you could take care of yourself.” “Well, I’m very confiding,” said Millicent Henning. Then she asked what had become of Mr Vetch. “We used to say that if Miss Pynsent was your mamma, he was your papa. In our family we used to call him Miss Pynsent’s young man.” “He’s her young man still,” Hyacinth said. “He’s our best friend—or supposed to be. He got me the place I’m in now. He lives by his fiddle, as he used to do.” Millicent looked a little at her companion, after which she remarked, “I should have thought he would have got you a place at his theatre.” “At his theatre? That would have been no use. I don’t play any instrument.” “I don’t mean in the orchestra, you gaby! You would look very nice in a fancy costume.” She had her elbows on the table, and her shoulders lifted, in an attitude of extreme familiarity. He was on the point of replying that he didn’t care for fancy costumes, he wished to go through life in his own character; but he checked himself, with the reflection that this was exactly what, apparently, he was destined not to do. His own character? He was to cover that up as carefully as possible; he was to go through life in a mask, in a borrowed mantle; he was to be, every day and every hour, an actor. Suddenly, with the utmost irrelevance, Miss Henning inquired, “Is Miss Pynsent some relation? What gave her any right over you?”