oment at a loss. He realised everything--the interacting
complexities of circumstance and character, the pride of place mingled
so inextricably with personal arrogance, the superabundant emotionalism,
the ingenuousness of outlook, the solid, the laborious respectability,
shot through so incongruously by temperamental cravings for the
coloured and the strange, the singular intellectual limitations, and the
mysteriously essential female elements impregnating every particle of
the whole. A smile hovered over his impassive features, and he
dubbed Victoria "the Faery." The name delighted him, for, with that
epigrammatic ambiguity so dear to his heart, it precisely expressed
his vision of the Queen. The Spenserian allusion was very pleasant--the
elegant evocations of Gloriana; but there was more in it than that:
there was the suggestion of a diminutive creature, endowed with
magical--and mythical--properties, and a portentousness almost
ridiculously out of keeping with the rest of her make-up. The Faery, he
determined, should henceforward wave her wand for him alone. Detachment
is always a rare quality, and rarest of all, perhaps, among politicians;
but that veteran egotist possessed it in a supreme degree. Not only did
he know what he had to do, not only did he do it; he was in the audience
as well as on the stage; and he took in with the rich relish of a
connoisseur every feature of the entertaining situation, every phase of
the delicate drama, and every detail of his own consummate performance.

The smile hovered and vanished, and, bowing low with Oriental gravity
and Oriental submissiveness, he set himself to his task. He had
understood from the first that in dealing with the Faery the appropriate
method of approach was the very antithesis of the Gladstonian; and such
a method was naturally his. It was not his habit to harangue and exhort
and expatiate in official conscientiousness; he liked to scatter flowers
along the path of business, to compress a weighty argument into a happy
phrase, to insinuate what was in his mind with an air of friendship
and confidential courtesy. He was nothing if not personal; and he had
perceived that personality was the key that opened the Faery's heart.
Accordingly, he never for a moment allowed his intercourse with her to
lose the personal tone; he invested all the transactions of State with
the charms of familiar conversation; she was always the royal lady, the
adored and revered mistress,