How right she had been to say that Lady Aurora would probably be fascinated at first was proved the first time Hyacinth went to Belgrave Square, a visit he was led to pay very promptly, by a deep sense of the obligations under which her ladyship had placed him at the time of Pinnie’s death. The circumstances 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, 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; yet she was 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 like a gentleman. She had never said the handsome, flattering things to him that had fallen from the lips of the Princess, and never explained to him her view of him; but her timid, cursory, receptive manner, which took all sorts of equalities for granted, was a homage to the idea of his refinement. 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 Belgrave Square, quite like one of the cosmopolites bred in that region. It took him, however, but a few minutes to perceive that 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 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 did not interrupt, for she never interrupted; but she took advantage of his first pause to say, quickly, irrelevantly, “Will the Princess Casamassima come again to Audley Court?”

“I have no doubt she will come again, if they would like her to.”

“I do hope she will. She is very wonderful,” Lady Aurora continued.

“Oh, yes, she is very wonderful. I think she gave Rosy pleasure,” said Hyacinth.

“Rosy can talk of nothing else. It would really do her great good to see the Princess again. Don’t you think she is different from anybody that 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 should go to see her.”

“Fancy!” exclaimed Lady Aurora; but she instantly obtained the Princess’s address from Hyacinth, and made a note of it in a small, shabby book. She mentioned that the card the Princess had given her in Camberwell proved to contain no address, and Hyacinth recognised that vagary – the Princess was so off-hand. Then she said, hesitating a little, “Does she really care for the poor?”

“If she doesn’t,” the young man replied, “I can’t imagine what interest she has in pretending to.”

“If she does, she’s very remarkable – she deserves great honour.”

“You really care; why is she more remarkable than you?” Hyacinth demanded.

“Oh, it’s very different – she’s so wonderfully attractive!” Lady Aurora replied, making, recklessly, the only allusion to the oddity of her own appearance in which Hyacinth was destined to hear her indulge. She became conscious of it the moment she had spoken, and said, quickly, to turn it off, “I should like to talk with her, but I’m rather afraid. She’s tremendously clever.”

“Ah, what she is you’ll find out when you know her!” Hyacinth sighed, expressively.

His hostess looked at him a little, and then, vaguely, exclaimed, “How very interesting!” The next moment she continued, “She might do so many other things; she might charm the world.”

“She does that, whatever she does,” said Hyacinth, smiling. “It’s all by the way; it needn’t interfere.”

“That’s what I mean, that most other people would be content – beautiful as she is. There’s great merit, when you give up something.”

“She has known a great many bad people, and she wants to know some good,” Hyacinth rejoined. “Therefore be sure to go to her soon.”

“She looks as if she had known nothing bad since she was born,” said Lady Aurora, rapturously. “I can’t imagine her going into all the dreadful places that she would have to.”

“You have gone into them, and it hasn’t hurt you,” Hyacinth suggested.

“How do you know that? My family think it has.”

“You make me glad that I haven’t a family,” said the young man.

“And the Princess – has she no one?”

“Ah, yes, she has a husband. But she doesn’t live with him.”

“Is he one of the bad persons?” asked Lady Aurora, as earnestly as a child listening to a tale.

“Well, I don’t like to abuse him, because he is down.”

“If I were a man, I should be in love with her,” said Lady Aurora. Then she pursued, “I wonder whether we might work together.”

“That’s exactly what she hopes.”

“I won’t show her the worst places,” said her ladyship, smiling.

To which Hyacinth replied, “I suspect you will do what every one else has done, namely, exactly what she wants!” Before he took leave he said to her, “Do you know whether Paul Muniment liked the Princess?”

Lady Aurora meditated a moment, apparently with some intensity. “I think he considered her extraordinarily beautiful – the most beautiful person he had ever seen.”

“Does he still believe her to be a humbug?”

“Still?” asked Lady Aurora, as if she didn’t understand.

“I mean that that was the impression apparently made upon him last winter by my description of her.”

“Oh, I’m sure he thinks her tremendously plucky!” That was all the satisfaction Hyacinth got just then as to Muniment’s estimate of the Princess.

A few days afterward he returned to Madeira Crescent, in the evening, the only time he was free, the Princess having given him a general invitation to take tea with her. He felt that he ought to be discreet in acting upon it, though he was not without reasons that would have warranted him in going early and often. He had a peculiar dread of her growing tired of him – boring herself in his society; yet at the same time he had rather a sharp vision of her boring herself without him, in the dull summer evenings, when even Paddington was out of town. He wondered what she did, what visitors dropped in, what pastimes she cultivated, what saved her from the sudden vagary of throwing up the whole of her present game. He remembered that there was a complete side of her life with which he was almost unacquainted (Lady Marchant and her daughters, at Medley, and three or four other persons who had called while he was there, being, in his experience, the only illustrations of it), and knew not to what extent she had, in spite of her transformation, preserved relations with her old friends; but he could easily imagine a day when she should discover that what she found in Madeira Crescent was less striking than what she missed. Going thither a second time Hyacinth perceived that he had done her great injustice; she was full of resources, she had never been so happy, she found time to read, to write, to commune with her piano, and above all to think – a delightful detachment from the invasive, vulgar, gossiping, distracting world she had known hitherto. The only interruption to her felicity was that she received quantities of notes from her former acquaintance, challenging her to give some account of herself, to say what had become of her, to come and stay with them in the country; but with these importunate missives she took a very short way – she simply burned them, without answering. She told Hyacinth immediately that Lady Aurora had called on her, two days before, at an hour when she was not in, and she had straightway addressed her, in return, an invitation to come to tea, any evening, at eight o’clock. That was the way the people in Madeira Crescent entertained each other (the Princess knew everything about them now, and was eager to impart her knowledge); and the evening, she was sure, would be much more convenient to Lady Aurora, whose days were filled with good works, peregrinations of charity. Her ladyship arrived ten minutes after Hyacinth; she told the Princess that her invitation had been expressed in a manner so irresistible that she was unwilling to wait more than a day to respond. She was introduced to Madame Grandoni, and tea was immediately served; Hyacinth being gratefully conscious the while of the super-subtle way in which Lady Aurora forbore to appear bewildered at meeting him in such society. She knew he frequented it, and she had been witness of his encounter w............