Lady
Castledean had kept over a man of her own, and that this offered a
certain sweet intelligibility as the note of the day? It made everything
fit; above all it diverted him to the extent of keeping up, while he
lingered and waited, his meditative smile. She had detained Charlotte
because she wished to detain Mr. Blint, and she couldn't detain Mr.
Blint, disposed though he clearly was to oblige her, without spreading
over the act some ampler drapery. Castledean had gone up to London; the
place was all her own; she had had a fancy for a quiet morning with Mr.
Blint, a sleek, civil, accomplished young man--distinctly younger than
her ladyship--who played and sang delightfully (played even "bridge"
and sang the English-comic as well as the French-tragic), and the
presence--which really meant the absence--of a couple of other friends,
if they were happily chosen, would make everything all right. The Prince
had the sense, all good-humouredly, of being happily chosen, and it was
not spoiled for him even by another sense that followed in its train
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 engrenage--claimed most of all
Castledean himself, who was so very oddly, given the personage and the
type, rather a large item. If he, on the other hand, had an affair, it
was not of that order; it was of the order, verily, that he had been
reduced to as a not quite glorious substitute.

It marked, however, the feeling of the hour with him 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 th