Poor Hyacinth murmured something about the unexpected honour; after all he had a French heredity and it wasn’t so easy for him to say things as ill as his other idiom mainly required. But Madame Grandoni, laying down her eyeglass, almost took the words out of his mouth with the cheerful exhortation: “Go and see her—go and see her once or twice. She’ll treat you like an angel.” “You must think me very peculiar,” the Princess remarked sadly. “I don’t know what I think. It will take a good while.” “I wish I could make you trust me—inspire you with confidence,” she went on. “I don’t mean only you personally, but others who think as you do. You’d find I’d go with you—pretty far. I was answering just now for Captain Sholto; but who in the world’s to answer for _me_?” And her sadness merged itself in a smile that affected Hyacinth as indescribably magnanimous and touching. “Not I, my dear, I promise you!” her ancient companion ejaculated with a laugh which made the people in the stalls look up at the box. Her spirit was contagious; it gave Hyacinth the audacity to say to her, “I’d trust _you_, if you did!” though he felt the next minute that this was even a more familiar speech than if he had expressed a want of confidence. “It comes then to the same thing,” said the Princess. “She wouldn’t show herself with me in public if I weren’t respectable. If you knew more about me you’d understand what has led me to turn my attention to the great social question. It’s a long story and the details wouldn’t interest you; but perhaps some day, if we have more talk, you’ll put yourself a little in my place. I’m very serious, you know; I’m not amusing myself with peeping and running away. I’m convinced that we’re living in a fool’s paradise, that the ground’s heaving under our feet.” “It’s not the ground, my dear; it’s you who are turning somersaults,” Madame Grandoni interposed. “Ah you, my friend, you’ve 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’m sure she could direct it in any sense she would wish!” the young man responded in his glow. The pure, high dignity with which the Princess had just spoken and which appeared to cover a suppressed tremor of passion set his pulses throbbing, and though he scarcely saw what she meant—her aspirations appearing as yet so vague—her tone, her voice, her wonderful face showed she had a generous soul.