“I’ll help you with pleasure to the best of my humble ability. But you’ll be awfully disappointed,” Hyacinth said. Very strange it seemed to him that within so few days two ladies of rank should have found occasion to express to him the same mysterious longing. A breeze from a thoroughly unexpected quarter was indeed blowing through the aristocracy. Nevertheless, though there was much of the same accent of passion in the Princess Casamassima’s communication that there had been in Lady Aurora’s, and though he felt bound to discourage his present interlocutress as he had done the other, the force that drove her struck him as a very different mixture from the shy, conscientious, anxious heresies of Rose Muniment’s friend. The temper varied in the two women as much as the aspect and the address, and that perhaps made their curiosity the more significant. “I haven’t the least doubt of it,” this investigator answered; “there’s nothing in life in which I’ve not been awfully disappointed. But disappointment for disappointment I shall like it better than some others. You’ll not persuade me either that among the people I speak of characters and passions and motives are not more natural, more complete, more _naïfs_. The upper classes are so deadly _banals_. My husband traces his descent from the fifth century, and he’s the greatest bore in Europe. That’s the kind of people I was condemned to by my marriage. Oh, if you knew what I’ve been through you’d allow that intelligent mechanics (of course I don’t want to know idiots) would be a pleasant change. I must begin with some one—mustn’t I?—so I began the other night with you!” As soon as she had uttered these words the Princess added a correction with the consciousness of her mistake in her face. It made that face, to Hyacinth, more nobly, tenderly beautiful. “The only objection to you individually is that you’ve nothing of the people about you—to-day not even the dress.” Her eyes wandered over him from head to foot, and their recognitions made him ashamed. “I wish you had come in the clothes you wear at your work.” “You see you do regard me as a curious animal,” he returned.