intellectual outlook of a caterpillar; but this was his privilege after a friendship now of seven years’ standing, which had begun (the year after he came to live in Lomax Place) with her going over to nurse him on learning from the milk-woman that he was alone at number 17—laid up there with an attack of gastritis. He always compared her to an insect or a bird, and she didn’t mind, because she knew he liked her, and she herself liked all winged creatures. How indeed could she complain after hearing him call the Queen a superannuated form and the Archbishop of Canterbury a grotesque superstition? He laid his violin-case on the table, which was covered with a confusion of fashion-plates and pin-cushions, and glanced toward the fire where a kettle was gently hissing. Miss Pynsent, who had put it on half an hour before, read his glance and reflected with complacency that Mrs. Bowerbank had not absolutely drained the little bottle in the cheffoneer. She placed it on the table again, this time with a single glass, and told her visitor that, as a great exception, he might light his pipe. In fact she always made the exception, and he always replied to the gracious speech by inquiring whether she supposed the greengrocers’ wives, the butchers’ daughters, for whom she worked had fine enough noses to smell in the garments she sent home the fumes of his tobacco. He knew her “connexion” was confined to small shopkeepers, but she didn’t wish others to know it and would have liked them to believe it important the poor little stuffs she made up (into very queer fashions I am afraid) should not surprise the feminine nostril. But it had always been impossible to impose on Mr. Vetch; he guessed the truth, the treacherous untrimmed truth, about everything in a moment. She was sure he would do so now in regard to this solemn question that had come up for Hyacinth; he would see that, though agreeably flurried at finding herself whirled in the last eddies of a case that had been so celebrated in its day, her secret wish was to shirk her duty—if it was a duty; to keep the child from ever knowing his mother’s unmentionable history, the shame that attached to his origin, the opportunity she had had of letting him see the wretched woman before it was too late. She knew Mr. Vetch would read her troubled thoughts, but she hoped he would say they were natural and just: she reflected that as he took an interest in Hyacinth he wouldn’t desire him to be subjected to a mortification that might rankle for ever and perhaps even crush him to the earth. She related Mrs. Bowerbank’s visit while he sat on the sofa in the very place where that majestic woman had reposed and puffed his smoke-wreaths into the dusky little room. He knew the story of the child’s birth, had known it years before, so that she had no startling revelation to make. He was not in the least agitated to hear of Florentine’s approaching end in prison and of her having managed to get a message