“What do you mean by an irresistible force?” the young man inquired, leaning back in his chair, with raised arms and his interlocked hands behind him, supporting his head. M. Poupin had spoken French, which he always preferred to do, the insular tongue being an immense tribulation to him; but his visitor spoke English, and Hyacinth immediately perceived that there was nothing French about _him_—M. Poupin could never tell him he had _la main parisienne_.
“I mean a force that will make the bourgeois go down into their cellars and hide, pale with fear, behind their barrels of wine and their heaps of gold!” cried M. Poupin, rolling terrible eyes.
“And in this country, I hope in their coal-bins. _Là-là_, we shall find them even there,” his wife remarked.
“’89 was an irresistible force,” said M. Poupin. “I believe you would have thought so if you had been there.”
“And so was the entrance of the Versaillais, which sent you over here, ten years ago,” the young man rejoined. He saw that Hyacinth was watching him, and he met his eyes, smiling a little, in a way that added to our hero’s interest.
“_Pardon, pardon_, I resist!” cried Eustache Poupin, glaring, in his improvised nightcap, out of his sheets; and Madame repeated that they resisted—she believed well that they resisted! The young man burst out laughing; whereupon his host declared, with a dignity which even his recumbent position did not abate, that it was really frivolous of him to ask such questions as that, knowing as he did—what he did know.
“Yes, I know—I know,” said the young man, good-naturedly, lowering his arms and thrusting his hands into his pockets, while he stretched his long legs a little. “But everything is yet to be tried.”
“Oh, the trial will be on a great scale—_soyez tranquille!_ It will be one of those experiments that constitute a proof.”
Hyacinth wondered what they were talking about, and perceived that it must be something important, for the stranger was not a man who would take an interest in anything else. Hyacinth was immensely struck with him—he could see that he was remarkable—and felt slightly aggrieved that he should be a stranger: that is, that he should be, apparently, a familiar of Lisson Grove and yet that M. Poupin should not have thought his young friend from Lomax Place worthy, up to this time, to be made acquainted with him. I know not to what degree the visitor in the other chair discovered these reflections in Hyacinth’s face, but after a moment, looking across at him, he said in a friendly yet just slightly diffident way, a way our hero liked, “And do you know, too?”
