“I see. Perhaps,” he smiled, “I don’t know what I mean.”
“Well, it’s what, just now, in all ways, you particularly should know.” Mrs. Assingham, however, made no more of this, having, before anything else, apparently, a scruple about the tone she had just used. “I quite understand, of course, that, given her great friendship with Maggie, she should have wanted to be present. She has acted impulsively—but she has acted generously.”
“She has acted beautifully,” said the Prince.
“I say ‘generously’ because I mean she hasn’t, in any way, counted the cost. She’ll have it to count, in a manner, now,” his hostess continued. “But that doesn’t matter.”
He could see how little. “You’ll look after her.”
“I’ll look after her.”
“So it’s all right.”
“It’s all right,” said Mrs. Assingham. “Then why are you troubled?”
It pulled her up—but only for a minute. “I’m not—any more than you.”
The Prince’s dark blue eyes were of the finest, and, on occasion, precisely, resembled nothing so much as the high windows of a Roman palace, of an historic front by one of the great old designers, thrown open on a feast-day to the golden air. His look itself, at such times, suggested an image—that of some very noble personage who, expected, acclaimed by the crowd in the street and with old precious stuffs falling over the sill for his support, had gaily and gallantly come to show himself: always moreover less in his own interest than in that of spectators and subjects whose need to admire, even to gape, was periodically to be considered. The young man’s expression became, after this fashion, something vivid and concrete—a beautiful personal presence, that of a prince in very truth, a ruler, warrior, patron, lighting up brave architecture and diffusing the sense of a function. It had been happily said of his face that the figure thus appearing in the great frame was the ghost of some proudest ancestor. Whoever the ancestor now, at all events, the Prince was, for Mrs. Assingham’s benefit, in view of the people. He seemed, leaning on crimson damask, to take in the bright day. He looked younger than his years; he was beautiful, innocent, vague.