THE PRINCE
distinctly, by the time they were seated together, the great question of what it might involve. It had come out for him before anything else, and so abruptly that this almost needed an explanation. Then the abruptness itself had appeared to explain—which had introduced in turn a slight awkwardness. "Do you know that they're not, after all, going to Matcham; so that if they don't—if at least Maggie doesn't—you won't, I suppose, go by yourself?" It was, as I say, at Matcham, where the event had placed him, it was at Matcham during the Easter days, that it most befell him, oddly enough, to live over inwardly, for its wealth of special significance, this passage by which the event had been really a good deal determined. He had paid first and last many an English country visit; he had learned even from of old to do the English things and to do them all sufficiently in the English way; if he didn't always enjoy them madly he enjoyed them at any rate as much, to all appearance, as the good people who had in the night of time unanimously invented them and who still, in the prolonged afternoon of their good faith, unanimously, even if a trifle automatically, practised them; yet with it all he had never so much as during such sojourns the trick of a certain detached, the amusement of a certain inward critical, life; the determined need, while apparently all participant, of returning upon himself, of backing noiselessly in, far in again, and rejoining there, as it were, that part of his mind that was not engaged at the front. His body, very constantly, was engaged at the front—in shooting, in riding, in golfing, in walking, over the fine
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