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By Root 7248 0

and with which during his life in England he had more than once had reflectively to deal: the state of being reminded how after all, as an outsider, a foreigner, and even as a mere representative husband and son-in-law, he was so irrelevant to the working of affairs that he could be bent on occasion to uses comparatively trivial. No other of her guests would have been thus convenient for their hostess; affairs, of whatever sorts, had claimed, by early trains, every active easy smoothly-working man, each in his way a lubricated item of the great social political administrative engrenage1 – claimed most of all Castledean himself, who was so very oddly, given the personage and the type, rather a large item. If he, the great and the clever Roman, on the other hand, had an affair, it wasn’t of that order; it was of the order verily that he had been reduced to as to a not quite glorious substitute.

It marked however the feeling of the hour with the Prince that this vision of being ‘reduced’ interfered not at all with the measure of his actual ease. It kept before him again at moments the so familiar fact of his sacrifices – down to the idea of the very relinquishment, for his wife’s convenience, of his real situation in the world; with the consequence thus that he was, in the last analysis, among all these so often inferior people, practically held cheap and made light of. But though all this was sensible enough there was a spirit in him that could rise above it, a spirit that positively played with the facts, with all of them; from that of the droll ambiguity of English relations to that of his having in mind something quite beautiful and independent and harmonious, something wholly his own. He couldn’t somehow take Mr Blint seriously – he was much more an outsider, by the larger scale, even than a Roman prince who consented to be in abeyance. Yet it was past finding out, either, how such a woman as Lady Castledean could take him – since this question but sank for him again into the fathomless depths of English equivocation. He knew them all, as was said, ‘well’; he had lived with them, stayed with them, dined, hunted, shot and done various other things with them; but the number of questions about them he couldn’t have answered had much rather grown than shrunken, so that experience struck him for the most part as having left in him but one residual impression. They didn’t like les situations nettes2 – that was all he was very sure of. They wouldn’t have them at any price; it had been their national genius and their national success to avoid them at every point. They called it themselves, with complacency, their wonderful spirit of compromise – the very influence of which actually so hung about him here from moment to moment that the earth and the air, the light and the colour, the fields and the hills and the sky, the blue-green counties and the cold cathedrals, owed to it every accent of their tone. Verily, as one had to feel in presence of such a picture, it had succeeded; it had made, up to now, for that seated solidity in the rich sea-mist on which the garish, the supposedly envious, peoples have ever cooled their eyes. But it was at the same time precisely why even much initiation left one at given moments so puzzled as to the element of staleness in all the freshness and of freshness in all the staleness, of innocence in the guilt and of guilt in the innocence. There were other marble terraces, sweeping more purple prospects, on which he would have known what to think, and would have enjoyed thereby at least the small intellectual fillip of a discerned relation between a given appearance and a taken meaning. The enquiring mind, in these present conditions, might, it was true, be more sharply challenged; but the result of its attention and its ingenuity, it had unluckily learned to know, was too often to be confronted with a mere dead wall, a lapse of logic, a confirmed bewilderment. And moreover above all nothing mattered, in the relation of the enclosing scene to his own consciousness, but its very most direct bearings.