THE PRINCE
perhaps drawn our circle too wide. Mrs. Rance at least controlled practically each other licence of the present and the near future: the licence to pass the hour as he would have found convenient; the licence to stop remembering for a little that though if proposed to—and not only by this aspirant but by any other—he wouldn't prove foolish, the proof of wisdom was none the less in such a fashion rather cruelly conditioned; the licence in especial to proceed from his letters to his journals and insulate, orientate himself afresh by the sound, over his gained interval, of the many-mouthed monster the exercise of whose lungs he so constantly stimulated. Mrs. Rance remained with him till the others came back from church, and, it was by that time clearer than ever that his ordeal, when it should arrive, would be really most unpleasant. His impression—this was the point—took somehow the form not so much of her wanting to press home her own advantage as of her building better than she knew; that is of her symbolising, with virtual unconsciousness, his own special deficiency, his unfortunate lack of a wife to whom applications could be referred. The applications, the contingencies with which Mrs. Rance struck him as potentially bristling, were really not of a sort to be met by one's self. And the possibility of them, when his visitor said, or as good as said, "I'm restrained, you see, because of Mr. Rance, and also because I'm proud and refined; but if it wasn't for Mr. Rance and for my refinement and my pride!"—the possibility of them, I say, turned to a great murmurous rustle, of a volume to fill the future; a rustle of petticoats, of scented many-paged letters,
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