How right had been her prevision that Lady Aurora would be fascinated at first was proved as soon as Hyacinth went to Belgrave Square—a visit he was promptly led to pay by a deep sense of the obligations under which her ladyship had placed him at the time of Pinnie’s death. The conditions in which he found her were quite the same as those of his visit the year before; she was spending the unfashionable season in her father’s empty house and amid a desert of brown holland and the dormant echoes of heavy conversation. He had seen so much of her during Pinnie’s illness that he felt—or had felt then—that he knew her almost intimately, that they had become real friends, almost comrades, and might meet henceforth without reserves or ceremonies. She was in spite of this as fluttered and awkward as she had been on the other occasion: not distant, but entangled in new coils of shyness and apparently unmindful of what had happened to draw them closer. Hyacinth, however, always liked extremely to be with her, for she was the person in the world who quietly, delicately and as a matter of course treated him most as a gentleman and appeared most naturally to take him for one. She had never addressed him the handsome flattering freedoms that had fallen from the lips of the Princess, and never explained at all her view of him; but her timid, cursory, receptive manner, which took all sorts of equalities and communities for granted, was a homage to the idea of his fine essence. It was in this manner that she now conversed with him on the subject of his foreign travels; he found himself discussing the political indications of Paris and the Ruskinian theories of Venice in Belgravia after the fashion of the cosmopolites bred by those wastes. It took him none the less but a few minutes to be sure Lady Aurora’s heart was not in these considerations; the deferential smile she bent upon him while she sat with her head thrust forward and her long hands clasped in her lap was slightly mechanical, her attitude all perfunctory. When he gave her his views of some of the _arrière-pensées_ of M. Gambetta—for he had views not altogether, as he thought, deficient in originality—she didn’t interrupt, for she never interrupted; but she took advantage of his first pause to say quickly and irrelevantly: “Will the Princess Casamassima come again to Audley Court?” “I’ve no doubt she’d come again if they’d particularly like her to.” “I do hope she will. She’s very wonderful,” Lady Aurora richly breathed. “Oh yes, she’s very wonderful. I think she gave Rosy pleasure.” “Rosy can talk of nothing else. It would really do her great good to have such an experience again. Don’t you think her quite different from anybody one has ever seen?” But her ladyship added before waiting for an answer to this: “I liked her quite extraordinarily.” “She liked you just as much. I know it would give her great pleasure if you could go to see her,” Hyacinth said.