a general assurance—­ that is for seeing one through at the worst—­had not even in the easiest hours of his old Roman life struck the Prince so convincingly.  His old Roman life had had more poetry, no doubt, but as he looked back upon it now it seemed to hang in the air of mere iridescent horizons, to have been loose and vague and thin, with large languorous unaccountable blanks.  The present order, as it spread about him, had somehow the ground under its feet, and a trumpet in its ears, and a bottomless bag of solid shining British sovereigns—­which was much to the point—­in its hand.  Courage and good-humour therefore were the breath of the day; though for ourselves at least it would have been also much to the point that, with Amerigo, really, the innermost effect of all this perceptive ease was perhaps a strange final irritation.  He compared the lucid result with the extraordinary substitute for perception that presided, in the bosom of his wife, at so contented a view of his conduct and course—­a state of mind that was positively like a vicarious good conscience, cultivated ingeniously on his behalf, a perversity of pressure innocently persisted in; and this wonder of irony became on occasion too intense to be kept wholly to himself.  It wasn’t that, at Matcham, anything particular, anything monstrous, anything that had to be noticed permitted itself, as they said, to “happen”; there were only odd moments when the breath of the day, as it has been called, struck him so full in the face that he broke out with all the hilarity of “What indeed would they have made of it?” “They” were of course Maggie and her father, moping—­so far as they ever consented to mope in monotonous Eaton Square, but placid too in the belief that they knew beautifully what their expert companions were in for.  They knew, it might have appeared in these lights, absolutely nothing on earth worth speaking of—­ whether beautifully or cynically; and they would perhaps sometimes be a little less trying if they would only once for all peacefully admit that knowledge wasn’t one of their needs and that they were in fact constitutionally inaccessible to it.  They were good children, bless their hearts, and the children of good children; so that, verily, the Principino himself, as less consistently of that descent, might figure to the fancy as the ripest genius of the trio.

The difficulty was, for the nerves of daily intercourse with Maggie in particular, that her imagination was clearly never ruffled by the sense of any anomaly.  The great anomaly would have been that her husband, or even that her father’s wife, should prove to have been made, for the long run, after the pattern set from so far back to the Ververs.  If one was so made one had certainly no business, on any terms, at Matcham; whereas if one wasn’t one had no business there on the particular terms—­terms of conformity with the principles of Eaton Square—­under which one had been so absurdly dedicated.  Deep