“I think you had better shut the door,” said Miss Pynsent, meaning that he had better shut their departing visitor out.
“Did you come here on purpose to see us?” Hyacinth asked, not heeding this injunction, of which he divined the spirit, and wishing the girl would take her leave, so that he might go out again with her. He should like talking with her much better away from Pinnie, who evidently was ready to stick a bodkin into her, for reasons he perfectly understood. He had seen plenty of them before, Pinnie’s reasons, even where girls were concerned who were not nearly so good-looking as this one. She was always in a fearful ‘funk’ about some woman getting hold of him, and persuading him to make a marriage beneath his station. His station!—poor Hyacinth had often asked himself, and Miss Pynsent, what it could possibly be. He had thought of it bitterly enough, and wondered how in the world he could marry ‘beneath’ it. He would never marry at all—to that his mind was absolutely made up; he would never hand on to another the burden which had made his own young spirit so intolerably sore, the inheritance which had darkened the whole threshold of his manhood. All the more reason why he should have his compensation; why, if the soft society of women was to be enjoyed on other terms, he should cultivate it with a bold, free mind.
“I thought I would just give a look at the old shop; I had an engagement not far off,” Millicent said. “But I wouldn’t have believed any one who had told me I should find you just where I left you.”
“We needed you to look after us!” Miss Pynsent exclaimed, irrepressibly.
“Oh, you’re such a swell yourself!” Hyacinth observed, without heeding the dressmaker.
“None of your impudence! I’m as good a girl as there is in London!” And to corroborate this, Miss Henning went on: “If you were to offer to see me a part of the way home, I should tell you I don’t knock about that way with gentlemen.”
“I’ll go with you as far as you like,” Hyacinth replied, simply, as if he knew how to treat that sort of speech.
“Well, it’s only because I knew you as a baby!” And they went out together, Hyacinth careful not to look at poor Pinnie at all (he felt her glaring whitely and tearfully at him out of her dim corner—it had by this time grown too dusky to work without a lamp), and his companion giving her an outrageously friendly nod of farewell over her shoulder.