THE GOLDEN BOWL
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 wasn't 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 Cas-
352
