ct, responsibly and
overtly, as she carried her head, her high tiara, her folded fan, her
indifferent, unattended eminence; and it was when he reached her and she
could, taking his arm, show herself as placed in her relation, that she
felt supremely justified. It was her notion of course that she gave a
glimpse of but few of her grounds for this discrimination--indeed of the
most evident alone; yet she would have been half willing it should be
guessed how she drew inspiration, drew support, in quantity sufficient
for almost anything, from the individual value that, through all the
picture, her husband's son-in-law kept for the eye, deriving it from
his fine unconscious way, in the swarming social sum, of outshining,
overlooking and overtopping. It was as if in separation, even the
shortest, she half forgot or disbelieved how he affected her sight, so
that reappearance had, in him, each time, a virtue of its own--a kind of
disproportionate intensity suggesting his connection with occult sources
of renewal. What did he do when he was away from her that made him
always come back only looking, as she would have called it, "more so?"
Superior to any shade of cabotinage, he yet almost resembled an actor
who, between his moments on the stage, revisits his dressing-room and,
before the glass, pressed by his need of effect, retouches his make-up.
The Prince was at present, for instance, though he had quitted her but
ten minutes before, still more than then the person it pleased her to be
left with--a truth that had all its force for her while he made her
his care for their conspicuous return together to the upper rooms.
Conspicuous beyond any wish they could entertain was what, poor
wonderful man, he couldn't help making it; and when she raised her eyes
again, on the ascent, to Bob Assingham, still aloft in his gallery and
still looking down at her, she was aware that, in spite of hovering and
warning inward voices, she even enjoyed the testimony rendered by his
lonely vigil to the lustre she reflected.

He was always lonely at great parties, the dear Colonel--it wasn't in
such places that the seed he sowed at home was ever reaped by him; but
nobody could have seemed to mind it less, to brave it with more bronzed
indifference; so markedly that he moved about less like one of the
guests than like some quite presentable person in charge of the police
arrangements or the electric light. To Mrs. Verver, as will be seen,
he represent