The main interest of these hours for us, however, will have been in the way the Prince continued to know, during a particular succession of others, separated from the evening in Eaton Square by a short interval, a certain persistent aftertaste. This was the lingering savour of a cup presented to him by Fanny Assingham's hand while, dinner done, the clustered quartette in the music-room kept their ranged companions moved if one would, but conveniently motionless. Mrs. Assingham contrived, after a couple of pieces, to convey to her friend that, for her part, she was moved--by the genius of Brahms--beyond what she could bear; so that, without apparent deliberation, she had presently floated away at the young man's side to such a distance as permitted them to converse without the effect of disdain.
It was the twenty minutes enjoyed with her, during the rest of the concert, in the less associated electric glare of one of the empty rooms--it was their achieved and, as he would have said, successful, most pleasantly successful, talk on one of the sequestered sofas, it was this that was substantially to underlie his consciousness of the later occasion. The later occasion, then mere matter of discussion, had formed her ground for desiring--in a light undertone into which his quick ear read indeed some nervousness--these independent words with him: she had sounded, covertly but (327) distinctly, by the time they were seated together, the great question of what it might involve. It had come out for him before anything else, and so abruptly that this almost needed an explanation. Then the abruptness itself had appeared to explain--which had introduced in turn a slight awkwardness. "Do you know that they're not, after all, going to Matcham; so that if they don't--if at least Maggie does n't--you won't, I suppose, go by yourself?" It was, as I say, at Matcham, where the event had placed him, it was at Matcham during the Easter days, that it most befell him, oddly enough, to live over inwardly, for its wealth of special significance, this passage by which the event had been really a good deal determined. 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 did n't always enjoy them madly he enjoyed them at any rate as much, to all 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, while apparently all participant, of returning upon himself, 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 (328) 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.