“I want to help you,” she said; and as she made this earnest appeal her face became transfigured: it wore an expression of the most passionate yet the purest longing. “I want to do something for the cause you represent; for the millions who are rotting under our feet—the millions whose whole life is passed on the brink of starvation, so that the smallest accident pushes them over. Try me, test me; ask me to put my hand to something, to prove that I’m as deeply in earnest as those who have already given proof. I know what I’m talking about—what one must meet and face and count with, the nature and the immensity of your organisation. I’m not trifling. No, I’m not trifling.” Paul Muniment watched her with his steady smile until this sudden outbreak had spent itself. “I was afraid you’d be like this—that you’d turn on the fountains and let off the fireworks.” “Permit me to believe you thought nothing about it. There’s no reason my fireworks should disturb you.” “I have always had a fear of clever women.” “I see—that’s a part of your prudence,” said the Princess reflectively. “But you’re the sort of man who ought to know how to use them.” He made no immediate answer to this; the way he appeared to regard her suggested that he was not following closely what she said so much as losing himself in certain matters which were beside that question—her beauty, for instance, her grace, her fragrance, the spectacle of a manner and quality so new to him. After a little, however, he brought out irrelevantly: “I’m afraid I’m awfully rude.” “Of course you are, but it doesn’t signify. What I mainly object to is that you don’t meet my questions. Wouldn’t some one else do Hyacinth Robinson’s work quite as well? Is it necessary to take a nature so delicate, so intellectual? Oughtn’t we to keep him for something finer?” “Finer than what?” “Than what he’ll be called upon to do.” “And pray what’s that?” the young man demanded. “You know nothing about it; no more do I,” he added in a moment. “It will require whatever it will. Besides, if some one else might have done it no one else volunteered. It happened that Robinson did.” “Yes, and you nipped him up!” the Princess returned. This expression made Muniment laugh. “I’ve no doubt you can easily keep him if you want him.” “I should like to do it in his place—that’s what I should like,” said the Princess. “As I say, you don’t even know what it is.” “It may be nothing,” she went on with her grave eyes fixed on her visitor. “I daresay you think that what I wanted to see you for was to beg you to let him off. But it wasn’t. Of course it’s his own affair and you can do nothing. But oughtn’t it to make some difference if his opinions have changed?” “His opinions? He never had any opinions,” Muniment replied. “He’s not like you and me.” “Well then, his feelings, his attachments. He hasn’t the passion for the popular triumph that he had when I first knew him. He’s much more tepid.” “Ah well, he’s quite right.”