“I don’t know which, and it doesn’t matter.  It’s not a question,” she smiled, “of a carriage the more or the less.  It’s not a question even, if you come to that, of a cab.  It’s so beautiful,” she said, “that it’s not a question of anything vulgar or horrid.”  Which she gave him time to agree about; and though he was silent it was, rather remarkably, as if he fell in.  “I went out—­I wanted to.  I had my idea.  It seemed to me important.  It has been—­it is important.  I know as I haven’t known before the way they feel.  I couldn’t in any other way have made so sure of it.”

“They feel a confidence,” the Prince observed.

He had indeed said it for her.  “They feel a confidence.”  And she proceeded, with lucidity, to the fuller illustration of it; speaking again of the three different moments that, in the course of her wild ramble, had witnessed her return—­for curiosity, and even really a little from anxiety—­to Eaton Square.  She was possessed of a latch-key, rarely used:  it had always irritated Adam—­one of the few things that did—­to find servants standing up so inhumanly straight when they came home, in the small hours, after parties.  “So I had but to slip in, each time, with my cab at the door, and make out for myself, without their knowing it, that Maggie was still there.  I came, I went—­without their so much as dreaming.  What do they really suppose,” she asked, “becomes of one?—­not so much sentimentally or morally, so to call it, and since that doesn’t matter; but even just physically, materially, as a mere wandering woman:  as a decent harmless wife, after all; as the best stepmother, after all, that really ever was; or at the least simply as a maitresse de maison not quite without a conscience.  They must even in their odd way,” she declared, “have some idea.”

“Oh, they’ve a great deal of idea,” said the Prince.  And nothing was easier than to mention the quantity.  “They think so much of us.  They think in particular so much of you.”

“Ah, don’t put it all on ’me’!” she smiled.

But he was putting it now where she had admirably prepared the place.  “It’s a matter of your known character.”

“Ah, thank you for ’known’!” she still smiled.

“It’s a matter of your wonderful cleverness and wonderful charm.  It’s a matter of what those things have done for you in the world—­I mean in this world and this place.  You’re a Personage for them—­and Personages do go and come.”

“Oh no, my dear; there you’re quite wrong.”  And she laughed now in the happier light they had diffused.  “That’s exactly what Personages don’t do:  they live in state and under constant consideration; they haven’t latch-keys, but drums and trumpets announce them; and when they go out in growlers it makes a greater noise still.  It’s you, caro mio,” she said, “who, so far as that goes, are the Personage.”

“Ah,” he in turn protested, “don’t put it all on me!  What, at any rate, when you get home,” he added, “shall you say that you’ve been doing?”