Hyacinth remembered the allusion the lady herself had made to her matrimonial situation; in spite of which he would have liked to be able to reply to Miss Henning that he didn’t believe a word of it. He withheld the doubt and after a moment simply remarked: “Well, I don’t care.” “You don’t care? Well, I do then!” Millicent cried. And as it was impossible in view of the performance and the jealous attention of their neighbours to continue the conversation at this pitch, she contented herself with ejaculating in a somewhat lower key at the end of five minutes during which she had been watching the stage: “Gracious, what dreadful common stuff!” Hyacinth then wondered if Captain Sholto had given her this formula. XIV He didn’t mention to Pinnie or Mr. Vetch that he had been taken up by a great lady; but he mentioned it to Paul Muniment, to whom he now confided a great many things. He had at first been in considerable fear of his straight loud north-country friend, who showed signs of cultivating logic and criticism in a degree that was hostile to fine loose talk; but he discovered in him later a man to whom one could say anything in the world if one didn’t think it of more importance to be sympathised with than to be understood. For a revolutionist he was strangely unexasperated, was indulgent even to contempt. The sight of all the things he wanted to change had seemingly no power to irritate him, and if he joked about questions that lay very near his heart his humour had no ferocity—the fault Hyacinth sometimes found with it rather was that it was innocent to puerility. Our hero envied his power of combining a care for the wide misery of mankind with the apparent state of mind of the cheerful and virtuous young workman who of a Sunday morning has put on a clean shirt and, not having taken the gilt off his wages the night before, weighs against each other, for a happy day, the respective attractions of Epping Forest and Gravesend. He never dragged in with the least snarl his personal lot and his daily life; it had not seemed to occur to him for instance that “society” was really responsible for the condition of his sister’s spinal column, though Eustache Poupin and his wife (who practically, however, were as patient as he) did everything they could to make him say so, believing evidently that it would relieve him. Apparently he cared nothing for women, talked of them rarely and always decently, and had never a sign of a sweetheart save in so far as Lady Aurora Langrish might pass for one. He never drank a drop of beer nor touched a pipe; he always had a clear tone, a fresh cheek and a merely, an imperturbably intelligent eye, and once excited on Hyacinth’s part a kind of elder-brotherly indulgence by the open-mouthed glee and credulity with which, when the pair were present, in the sixpenny gallery, at Astley’s, at an equestrian pantomime, he followed the tawdry spectacle. He once