it would positively help them to have done so together.  Each of them would, in this way, at home, have the other comfortably to blame.  All of which, besides, in Lady Castledean as in Maggie, in Fanny Assingham as in Charlotte herself, was working; for him without provocation or pressure, by the mere play of some vague sense on their part—­definite and conscious at the most only in Charlotte—­that he was not, as a nature, as a character, as a gentleman, in fine, below his remarkable fortune.

But there were more things before him than even these; things that melted together, almost indistinguishably, to feed his sense of beauty.  If the outlook was in every way spacious—­and the towers of three cathedrals, in different counties, as had been pointed out to him, gleamed discernibly, like dim silver, in the rich sameness of tone—­didn’t he somehow the more feel it so because, precisely, Lady Castledean had kept over a man of her own, and that this offered a certain sweet intelligibility as the note of the day?  It made everything fit; above all it diverted him to the extent of keeping up, while he lingered and waited, his meditative smile.  She had detained Charlotte because she wished to detain Mr. Blint, and she couldn’t detain Mr. Blint, disposed though he clearly was to oblige her, without spreading over the act some ampler drapery.  Castledean had gone up to London; the place was all her own; she had had a fancy for a quiet morning with Mr. Blint, a sleek, civil, accomplished young man—­distinctly younger than her ladyship—­who played and sang delightfully (played even “bridge” and sang the English-comic as well as the French-tragic), and the presence—­which really meant the absence—­of a couple of other friends, if they were happily chosen, would make everything all right.  The Prince had the sense, all good-humouredly, of being happily chosen, and it was not spoiled for him even by another sense that followed in its train and with which, during his life in England, he had more than once had reflectively to deal:  the state of being reminded how, after all, as an outsider, a foreigner, and even as a mere representative husband and son-in-law, he was so irrelevant to the working of affairs that he could be bent on occasion to uses comparatively trivial.  No other of her guests would have been thus convenient for their hostess; affairs, of whatever sorts, had claimed, by early trains, every active, easy, smoothly-working man, each in his way a lubricated item of the great social, political, administrative engrenage—­claimed most of all Castledean himself, who was so very oddly, given the personage and the type, rather a large item.  If he, on the other hand, had an affair, it was not of that order; it was of the order, verily, that he had been reduced to as a not quite glorious substitute.