THE PRINCE
tledean himself, who was so very oddly, given the personage and the type, rather a large item. If he, the great and the clever Roman, on the other hand, had an affair, it wasn't of that order; it was of the order verily that he had been reduced to as to a not quite glorious substitute.
It marked however the feeling of the hour with the Prince 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 there was a spirit in him that could rise above it, a spirit that positively played with the facts, with all of them; from that of the droll ambiguity of English relations to that of his having in mind something quite beautiful and independent and harmonious, something wholly his own. He couldn't somehow take Mr. Blint seriously—he was much more an outsider, by the larger scale, even than a Roman prince who consented to be in abeyance. Yet it was past finding out, either, how such a woman as Lady Castledean could take him since this question but sank for him again into the fathomless depths of English equivocation. He knew them all, as was said, "well"; he had lived with them, stayed with them, dined, hunted, shot and done various other things with them; but the number of questions about them he couldn't
353
