should have precisely to make acquaintance with it first—to show her the reality of the horrors of which she dreamed the world might be purged. He had ceased himself to care for the slums and had reasons for not wishing to spend his remnant in the study of foul things; but he would go through with his part of the engagement. He might be detached and mechanical, but any dreariness would have a gilding that should involve an association with her. What indeed if she should have changed, have availed herself of that great right of unapologetic inconsequence which he believed to be, at least in their relation with nobodies, the highest luxury of the happy? What if, from a high insolence which he thought of as lurking somewhere in the side-scenes of her nature, though he had really not once seen it step to the front, she should toss back her perfect head with a movement signifying that he was too basely literal and that she knew him no more? His imagination represented her this evening in places where a barrier of dazzling light shut her out from access or even from any appeal. He saw her with other people, in splendid rooms where “the dukes” had possession of her, smiling, satisfied, surrounded, covered with jewels. When this vision grew intense he found a reassurance in reflecting that after all she would be unlikely to throw him personally over so long as she should remain as deeply compromised, subterraneously speaking, as she had—successfully it seemed—tried to become, and that it would not be easy for her to liberate herself from that entanglement. She had of course told him more, at Medley, of the manner in which she had already committed herself, and he remembered with a strange perverse elation that she had gone very far indeed. In the intervals of the foolish play Mr. Vetch, who lingered in his place in the orchestra while his mates descended into the little hole under the stage, leaned over the rail and asked his young friend occasional questions, carrying his eyes at the same time about the dingy house at whose smoky ceiling and tarnished galleries he had been staring for so many a year. He came back to Hyacinth’s letters and said: “Of course you know they were clever; they entertained me immensely. But as I read them I thought of poor Pinnie: I wished she could have listened to them; they would have made her so happy.” “Yes, poor Pinnie,” Hyacinth murmured while his friend went on: “I was in Paris in 1846; I stayed at a small hotel in the Rue Mogador. I judge from your letters that everything’s changed. Does the Rue Mogador still exist? Yes, everything’s changed. I daresay it’s all much finer, but I liked it very much as it was then. At all events I’m right in supposing—am I not?—that it cheered you up considerably, made you really happy.” “Why should I have wanted any cheering? I was happy enough,” Hyacinth replied.