by the Prince’s leave, he would immediately go to see. He was funny, while they talked, about his own people too, whom he described, with anecdotes of their habits, imitations of their manners and prophecies of their conduct, as more rococo9 than anything Cadogan Place would ever have known. This, Mrs Assingham professed, was exactly what would endear them to her, and that in turn drew from her visitor a fresh declaration of all the comfort of his being able so to depend on her. He had been with her at this point some twenty minutes; but he had paid her much longer visits, and he stayed now as if to make his attitude prove his appreciation. He stayed moreover – that was really the sign of the hour – in spite of the nervous unrest that had brought him and that had in truth much rather fed on the scepticism by which she had apparently meant to soothe it. She hadn’t soothed him, and there arrived remarkably a moment when the cause of her failure gleamed out. He hadn’t frightened her, as she called it – he felt that; yet she was herself not at ease. She had been nervous, though trying to disguise it; the sight of him, following on the announcement of his name, had shown her as disconcerted. This conviction, for the young man, deepened and sharpened; yet with the effect too of making him glad in spite of it. It was as if, in calling, he had done even better than he intended. For it was somehow important – that was what it was – that there should be at this hour something the matter with Mrs Assingham, with whom, in all their acquaintance, so considerable now, there had never been the least little thing the matter. To wait thus and watch for it was to know of a truth that there was something the matter with him; since – strangely, with so little to go upon – his heart had positively begun to beat to the time of suspense. It fairly befell at last for a climax that they almost ceased to pretend – to pretend, that is, to cheat each other with forms. The unspoken had come up, and there was a crisis – neither could have said how long it lasted – during which they were reduced, for all interchange, to looking at each other on quite an inordinate scale. They might at this moment, in their positively portentous stillness, have been keeping it up for a wager, sitting for their photograph or even enacting a tableau-vivant.10
The spectator of whom they would thus well have been worthy might have read meanings of his own into the intensity of their communion – or indeed, even without meanings, have found his account, æsthetically, in some gratified play of our modern sense of type, so scantly to be distinguished from our modern sense of beauty. Type was there, at the worst, in Mrs Assingham’s dark neat head, on which the crisp black hair made waves so fine and so numerous that she looked even more in the fashion of the hour than she desired. Full of discriminations against the obvious, she had yet to accept a flagrant appearance and to make the best of misleading signs. Her richness of hue, her generous nose, her eyebrows marked like those of an actress – these things, with an added amplitude of person on which middle age had set its seal, seemed to present her insistently as a daughter of the South, or still more of the East, a creature formed by hammocks and divans, fed upon sherbets and waited upon by slaves. She looked as if her most active effort might be to take up, as she lay back, her mandolin, or to share a sugared fruit with a pet gazelle. She was in fact however neither a pampered Jewess nor a lazy Creole; New York had been recordedly her birthplace and ‘Europe’ punctually her discipline. She wore yellow and purple because she thought it better, as she said, while one was about it, to look like the Queen of Sheba11 than like a revendeuse;12 she put pearls in her hair and crimson and gold in her tea-gown for the same reason: it was her theory that nature itself had overdressed her and that her only course was to drown, as it was hopeless to try to chasten, the over-dressing. So she was covered and surrounded with ‘things’, which