t and
arrangement that made her personal scheme a success, the PROVED private
theory that materials to work with had been all she required and that
there were none too precious for her to understand and use--to which
might be added lastly, as the strong-scented flower of the total
sweetness, an easy command, a high enjoyment, of her crisis. For a
crisis she was ready to take it, and this ease it was, doubtless, that
helped her, while she waited, to the right assurance, to the right
indifference, to the right expression, and above all, as she felt,
to the right view of her opportunity for happiness--unless indeed the
opportunity itself, rather, were, in its mere strange amplitude, the
producing, the precipitating cause. The ordered revellers, rustling and
shining, with sweep of train and glitter of star and clink of sword, and
yet, for all this, but so imperfectly articulate, so vaguely vocal--the
double stream of the coming and the going, flowing together where she
stood, passed her, brushed her, treated her to much crude contemplation
and now and then to a spasm of speech, an offered hand, even in some
cases to an unencouraged pause; but she missed no countenance and
invited no protection: she fairly liked to be, so long as she might,
just as she was--exposed a little to the public, no doubt, in her
unaccompanied state, but, even if it were a bit brazen, careless of
queer reflections on the dull polish of London faces, and exposed, since
it was a question of exposure, to much more competent recognitions
of her own. She hoped no one would stop--she was positively keeping
herself; it was her idea to mark in a particular manner the importance
of something that had just happened. She knew how she should mark it,
and what she was doing there made already a beginning.

When presently, therefore, from her standpoint, she saw the Prince come
back she had an impression of all the place as higher and wider and
more appointed for great moments; with its dome of lustres lifted,
its ascents and descents more majestic, its marble tiers more vividly
overhung, its numerosity of royalties, foreign and domestic, more
unprecedented, its symbolism of "State" hospitality both emphasised and
refined. This was doubtless a large consequence of a fairly familiar
cause, a considerable inward stir to spring from the mere vision,
striking as that might be, of Amerigo in a crowd; but she had her
reasons, she held them there, she carried them in fa