“I’m not sure that I find it so! However, I ought to tell you that you needn’t have the least fear of Captain Sholto. He’s a perfectly honest man, so far as he goes; and even if you had trusted him much more than you appear to have done he’d be incapable of betraying you. However, don’t trust him: not because he’s not safe, but because—!” She took herself up. “No matter, you’ll see for yourself. He has gone into that sort of thing simply to please me. I should tell you, merely to make you understand, that he would do anything for that. That’s his own affair. I wanted to know something, to learn something, to ascertain what really is going on; and for a woman everything of that sort’s so difficult, especially for a woman in my position, who’s tiresomely known and to whom every sort of bad faith is sure to be imputed. So Sholto said he would look into the subject for me. Poor man, he has had to look into so many subjects! What I particularly wanted was that he should make friends with some of the leading spirits, really characteristic types.” The Princess’s voice was low and rather deep, but her tone perfectly natural and easy, with a charming assumption—for you could call it nothing else—of more wonderful things than he could count. Her manner of speaking was in fact altogether new to her listener, for whom the pronunciation of her words and the very punctuation of her sentences were the revelation of what he supposed to be society—the very Society to the destruction of which he was dedicated. “Surely Captain Sholto doesn’t suppose _I’m_ a leading spirit!” he exclaimed with the resolve not to be laughed at any more than he could help. “He told me you were very original.” “He doesn’t know, and—if you’ll allow me to say so—I don’t think _you_ know. How should you? I’m one of many thousands of young men of my class—you know, I suppose, what _that_ is—in whose brains certain ideas are fermenting. There’s nothing original about me at all. I’m very young and very ignorant; it’s only a few months since I began to talk of the possibility of a social revolution with men who have considered the whole ground much more than I could possibly do. I’m a mere particle,” Hyacinth wound up, “in the grey immensity of the people. All I pretend to is my good faith and a great desire that justice shall be done.”