'You confirm, completely, my first impression,' the Princess returned, smiling in a way that showed him he really amused her. 'We shall discover the limits of your comprehension! I am atrociously nervous. But it will pass. How is your friend the dressmaker?' she inquired, abruptly. And when Hyacinth had briefly given some account of poor Pinnie—told her that she was tolerably well for her, but old and tired and sad, and not very successful—she exclaimed, impatiently, 'Ah, well, she's not the only one!' and came back, with irrelevance, to the former question. 'It's not only my husband's visit—absolutely unexpected!—that has made me fidgety, but the idea that now you have been so kind as to come here you may wonder why, after all, I made such a point of it, and even think any explanation I might be able to give you entirely insufficient.'
'I don't want any explanation,' said Hyacinth.
'It's very nice of you to say that, and I shall take you at your word. Explanations usually make things worse. All the same, I don't want you to think (as you might have done so easily the other evening), that I wish only to treat you as a curious animal.'
'I don't care how you treat me!' said Hyacinth, smiling.
There was a considerable silence, after which the Princess remarked, 'All I ask of my husband is to let me alone. But he won't. He won't reciprocate my indifference.'
Hyacinth asked himself what reply he ought to make to such an announcement as that, and it seemed to him that the least civility demanded was that he should say—as he could with such conviction—'It can't be easy to be indifferent to you.'
