“Your ideas about my ideas!” Hyacinth wailed. “Yes, you should see me in the back slums. I’m a bigger Philistine than you, Miss Henning.” “You’ve got more ridiculous names, if that’s what you mean. I don’t believe you half the time know what you do mean yourself. I don’t believe you even know with all your thinking what you do think. That’s your disease.” “It’s astonishing how you sometimes put your finger on the place,” he now returned with interest. “I mean to think no more—I mean to give it up. Avoid it yourself, dear friend—avoid it as you would a baleful vice. It confers no true happiness. Let us live in the world of irreflective contemplation—let us live in the present hour.” “I don’t care how I live nor where I live,” she cried, “so long as I can do as I like. It’s them that are over you—it’s them that cut it fine! But you never were really satisfactory to me—not as one friend should be to another,” she pursued, reverting irresistibly to the concrete and turning still upon her companion that fine fairness which had no cause to shrink from a daylight exhibition. “Do you remember that day I came back to the Plice, ever so long ago, and called on poor dear Miss Pynsent—she couldn’t abide me, she never understood my form—and waited till you came in, and then went a walk with you and had tea at a coffee-shop? Well, I don’t mind telling you that you weren’t satisfactory to me even that night, and that I consider myself remarkably good-natured, ever since, to have kept you so little up to the mark. You always tried to carry it off as if you were telling one everything, and you never told one nothing at all.” “What is it you want me to tell, my dear child?” Hyacinth freely fluted, putting his hand into her arm. “I’ll tell you anything in life you like.” “I daresay you’ll tell me no end of rot. Certainly I tried kindness on you,” Miss Henning declared. “Try it again; don’t give it up,” said her friend while he moved with her in close association. She stopped short, detaching herself, though not with intention. “Well then, _has_ she clean chucked you?” Hyacinth’s eyes turned away; he looked at the green expanse, misty and sunny, dotted with Sunday-keeping figures which made it seem larger; at the wooded boundary of the Park, beyond the grassy moat of the Gardens; at a shining reach of the Serpentine on the one side and the far façades of Bayswater, brightened by the fine weather and the privilege of their view, on the other. “Well, you know, I rather fancy it,” he replied in a moment. “Ah the vile brute!” she rang out as they resumed their walk.