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 an 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, which apparently all participant, of returning upon itself, 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 diagonals of meadow-paths or round the pocketed corners of billiard-tables; it sufficiently, on the whole, in fact, bore the brunt of bridge-playing, of breakfasting, lunching, tea-drinking, dining, and of the nightly climax over the bottigliera, as he called it, of the bristling tray; it met, finally, to the extent of the limited tax on lip, on gesture, on wit, most of the current demands of conversation and expression.  Therefore something of him, he often felt at these times, was left out; it was much more when he was alone, or when he was with his own people—­or when he was, say, with Mrs. Verver and nobody else—­that he moved, that he talked, that he listened, that he felt, as a congruous whole.

“English society,” as he would have said, cut him, accordingly, in two, and he reminded himself often, in his relations with it, of a man possessed of a shining star, a decoration, an order of some sort, something so ornamental as to make his identity not complete, ideally, without it, yet who, finding no other such object generally worn, should be perpetually, and the least bit ruefully, unpinning it from his breast to transfer it to his pocket.  The Prince’s shining star may, no doubt, having been nothing more precious than his private subtlety; but whatever the object was he just now fingered it a good deal, out of sight—­ amounting as it mainly did for him to a restless play of memory and a fine embroidery of thought.  Something had rather momentously occurred, in Eaton Square, during his enjoyed minutes with his old friend:  his present perspective made definitely clear to him that she had plumped out for him her first little lie.  That took on—­and he could scarce have said why—­a sharpness of importance:  she had never lied to him before—­if only because it had never come up for her, properly, intelligibly, morally, that she must.  As soon as she had put to him the question of what he would do—­by which she meant of what Charlotte would also do—­ in that event of Maggie’s and Mr. Verver’s not embracing the proposal