at all imposing; still, it differed agreeably from what they had hitherto seen.
Charlotte, after the incident, was to be full of impressions, of several of which, later on, she gave her companion--always in the interest of their amusement--the benefit; and one of the impressions had been that the man himself was the greatest curiosity they had looked at. The Prince was to reply to this that he himself hadn't looked at him; as, precisely, in the general connection, Charlotte had more than once, from other days, noted, for his advantage, her consciousness of how, below a certain social plane, he never SAW. One kind of shopman was just like another to him--which was oddly inconsequent on the part of a mind that, where it did notice, noticed so much. He took throughout, always, the meaner sort for granted--the night of their meanness, or whatever name one might give it for him, made all his cats grey. He didn't, no doubt, want to hurt them, but he imaged them no more than if his eyes acted only for the level of his own high head. Her own vision acted for every relation--this he had seen for himself: she remarked beggars, she remembered servants, she recognised cabmen; she had often distinguished beauty, when out with him, in dirty children; she had admired "type" in faces at hucksters' stalls. Therefore, on this occasion, she had found their antiquario interesting; partly because he cared so for his things, and partly because he cared-- well, so for them. "He likes his things--he loves them," she was to say; "and it isn't only--it isn't perhaps even at all--that he loves to sell them. I think he would love to keep them if he could; and he prefers, at any rate, to sell them to right people. We, clearly, were right people--he knows them when he sees them; and that's why, as I say, you could make out, or at least _I_ could, that he cared for us. Didn't you see"--she was to ask it with an insistence--"the way he looked at us and took us in? I doubt if either of us have ever been so well looked at before. Yes, he'll remember us"--she was to profess herself convinced of that almost to uneasiness. "But it was after all"--this was perhaps reassuring--"because, given his taste, since he HAS taste, he was pleased with us, he was struck--he had ideas about us. Well, I should think people might; we're beautiful--aren't we?--and he knows. Then, also, he has his way; for that way of
