He had no money to pay for places at a theatre in the Strand, Millicent Henning having made it clear to him that on this occasion she expected something better than the pit. “Should you like the royal box or a couple of stalls at ten bob apiece?” he asked of her on a note of that too uniform irony which formed the basis of almost all their talk. She had replied that she would content herself with a seat in the second balcony, in the very front; and as such a position involved an expenditure still beyond his compass he waited one night on Mr. Vetch, to whom he had already more than once had recourse in moments of pecuniary embarrassment. His relations with the caustic fiddler were of the oddest and much easier when put to the proof than in theory. Mr. Vetch had let him know—long before this and with the purpose of covering Pinnie to the utmost—the part he had played at the crisis of that question of her captive’s being taken to call on Mrs. Bowerbank; and Hyacinth, in the face of this information, had asked with some sublimity what the devil the fiddler had had to do with his private affairs. Their neighbour had replied that it was not as an affair of his but as an affair of Pinnie’s he had considered the matter; and our hero had afterwards let it drop, though he had never been formally reconciled to so officious a critic. Of course his feeling on this head had been immensely modified by the trouble Mr. Vetch had taken to get him a place with old Crook; and at the period of which I write it had long been familiar to him that the author of that benefit didn’t care a straw what he thought of his advice at the dark hour and in fact took a perverse pleasure in “following” the career of a youth put together of such queer pieces. It was impossible to Hyacinth not to be conscious that this projected attention was kindly; and to-day, at any rate, he would have declared that nothing could have made up to him for not knowing the truth, horrible as it might be. His miserable mother’s embrace seemed to furnish him with an inexhaustible fund of motive, and in the conditions that was a support. What he chiefly objected to in Mr. Vetch was the betrayed habit of still regarding him as extremely juvenile; he would have got on much better with a better recognition of his being already a man of the world. The obscure virtuoso knew an immense deal about society and seemed to know the more because he never swaggered—it was only little by little you discovered it; but that was no reason for his looking as if his chief boon in life was a private diverting commentary on the conversation of his young friend. Hyacinth felt that he gave considerable evidence of patience with this when he occasionally asked his fellow-resident in Lomax Place to lend him half-a-crown. Somehow circumstances had of old tied them together, and though this partly vexed the little bookbinder it also touched him; he had more than once solved the problem of deciding how to behave (when