To ask himself if she were in earnest was now an old story to him, and indeed the conviction he might arrive at on this head had ceased to have any high importance. It was just as she was, superficial or profound, that she held him, and she was at any rate sufficiently animated by a purpose for her doings to have consequences actual and possible. Some of these might be serious even if she herself were shallow, and there were times when he was much visited by the apprehension of them. On the Sundays when she had gone with him into the darkest places, the most fetid holes in London, she had always taken money with her in considerable quantities and had always left it behind. She said very naturally that one couldn’t go and stare at people for an impression without paying them, and she gave alms right and left, indiscriminately, without inquiry or judgement, as simply as the abbess of some beggar-haunted convent or a lady-bountiful of the superstitious unscientific ages who should have hoped to be assisted to heaven by her doles. Hyacinth never said to her, though he sometimes thought it, that since she was so full of the modern spirit her charity should be administered according to the modern lights, the principles of economic science: partly because she wasn’t a woman to be directed and regulated—she could take other people’s meanings but could never take their forms. Besides, what did it matter? To himself what did it matter to-day whether he were drawn into right methods or into wrong ones, his time being too short for regret or for cheer? The Princess was an embodied passion—she was not a system: and her behaviour, after all, was more addressed to relieving herself than to relieving others. And then misery was sown so thick in her path that wherever her money was dropped it fell into some clutching palm. He wondered she should still have so much cash to dispose of till she explained that she came by it through putting her personal expenditure on a rigid footing. What she gave away was her savings, the margin she had succeeded in creating; and now that she had tasted of the satisfaction of making little hoards for such a purpose she regarded her other years, with their idleness and waste, their merely personal motives, as a long, stupid sleep of the conscience. To do something for others was not only so much more human—it was so much more amusing!