The aspect of South Street, Mayfair, on a Sunday afternoon in August, is not enlivening, yet the Prince had stood for ten minutes gazing out of the window at the genteel vacancy of the scene; at the closed blinds of the opposite houses, the lonely policeman on the corner, covering a yawn with a white cotton hand, the low-pitched light itself, which seemed conscious of an obligation to observe the decency of the British Sabbath. The Prince, however, had a talent for that kind of attitude; it was one of the things by which he had exasperated his wife; he could remain motionless, with the aid of some casual support for his high, lean person, considering serenely and inexpressively any object that might lie before him and presenting his aristocratic head at a favourable angle, for periods of extraordinary length. On first coming into the room he had given some attention to its furniture and decorations, perceiving at a glance that they were rich and varied; some of the things he recognised as old friends, odds and ends the Princess was fond of, which had accompanied her in her remarkable wanderings, while others were unfamiliar, and suggested vividly that she had not ceased to ‘collect’. The Prince made two reflections: one was that she was living as expensively as ever; the other that, however this might be, no one had such a feeling as she for the mise-en-scène of life, such a talent for arranging a room. She had still the most charming salon in Europe.

It was his impression that she had taken the house in South Street but for three months; yet, gracious heaven, what had she not put into it? The Prince asked himself this question without violence, for that was not to be his line to-day. He could be angry to a point at which he himself was often frightened, but he honestly believed that this was only when he had been baited beyond endurance and that as a usual thing he was really as mild and accommodating as the extreme urbanity of his manner appeared to announce. There was indeed nothing to suggest to the world in general that he was an impracticable or vindictive nobleman: his features were not regular, and his complexion had a bilious tone; but his dark brown eye, which was at once salient and dull, expressed benevolence and melancholy; his head drooped from his long neck in a considerate, attentive style; and his close-cropped black hair, combined with a short, fine, pointed beard, completed his resemblance to some old portrait of a personage of distinction under the Spanish dominion at Naples. To-day, at any rate, he had come in conciliation, almost in humility, and that is why he did not permit himself even to murmur at the long delay to which he was subjected. He knew very well that if his wife should consent to take him back it would be only after a probation to which this little wait in her drawing-room was a trifle. It was a quarter of an hour before the door opened, and even then it was not the Princess who appeared, but only Madame Grandoni.

Their greeting was a very silent one. She came to him with both hands outstretched, and took his own and held them awhile, looking up at him in a kindly, motherly manner. She had elongated her florid, humorous face to a degree that was almost comical, and the pair might have passed, in their speechless solemnity, for acquaintances meeting in a house in which a funeral was about to take place. It was indeed a house on which death had descended, as he very soon learned from Madame Grandoni’s expression; something had perished there for ever, and he might proceed to bury it as soon as he liked. His wife’s ancient German friend, however, was not a person to keep up a manner of that sort very long, and when, after she had made him sit down on the sofa beside her, she shook her head, slowly and definitely, several times, it was with a face in which a more genial appreciation of the circumstances had already begun to appear.

“Never – never – never?” said the Prince, in a deep, hoarse voice, which was at variance with his aristocratic slimness. He had much of the aspect which, in late-coming members of long-descended races, we qualify to-day as effete; but his speech might have been the speech of some deep-chested fighting ancestor.

“Surely you know your wife as well as I,” she replied, in Italian, which she evidently spoke with facility, though with a strong guttural accent. “I have been talking with her: that is what has made me keep you. I have urged her to see you. I have told her that this could do no harm and would pledge her to nothing. But you know your wife,” Madame Grandoni repeated, with a smile which was now distinctly facetious.

Prince Casamassima looked down at his boots. “How can one ever know a person like that? I hoped she would see me for five minutes.”

“For what purpose? Have you anything to propose?”

“For what purpose? To rest my eyes on her beautiful face.”

“Did you come to England for that?”

“For what else should I have come?” the Prince inquired, turning his blighted gaze to the opposite side of South Street.

“In London, such a day as this, già,” said the old lady, sympathetically. “I am very sorry for you; but if I had known you were coming I would have written to you that you might spare yourself the pain.”

The Prince gave a low, interminable sigh. “You ask me what I wish to propose. What I wish to propose is that my wife does not kill me inch by inch.”

“She would be much more likely to do that if you lived with her!” Madame Grandoni cried.

“Cara signora, she doesn’t appear to have killed you,” the melancholy nobleman rejoined.

“Oh, me? I am past killing. I am as hard as a stone. I went through my miseries long ago; I suffered what you have not had to suffer; I wished for death many times, and I survived it all. Our troubles don’t kill us, Prince; it is we who must try to kill them. I have buried not a few. Besides Christina is fond of me, God knows why!” Madame Grandoni added.

“And you are so good to her,” said the Prince, laying his hand on her fat, wrinkled fist.

“Che vuole? I have known her so long. And she has some such great qualities.”

“Ah, to whom do you say it?” And Prince Casamassima gazed at his boots again, for some moments, in silence. Suddenly he inquired, “How does she look to-day?”

“She always looks the same: like an angel who came down from heaven yesterday and has been rather disappointed in her first day on earth!”

The Prince was evidently a man of a simple nature, and Madame Grandoni’s rather violent metaphor took his fancy. His face lighted up for a moment, and he replied with eagerness, “Ah, she is the only woman I have ever seen whose beauty never for a moment falls below itself. She has no bad days. She is so handsome when she is angry!”

“She is very handsome to-day, but she is not angry,” said the old lady.

“Not when my name was announced?”

“I was not with her then; but when she sent for me and asked me to see you, it was quite without passion. And even when I argued with her, and tried to persuade her (and she doesn’t like that, you know), she was still perfectly quiet.”

“She hates me, she despises me too much, eh?”

“How can I tell, dear Prince, when she never mentions you?”

“Never, never?”

“That’s much better than if she railed at you and abused you.”

“You mean it should give me more hope for the future?” the young man asked, quickly.

Madame Grandoni hesitated a moment. “I mean it’s better for me,” she answered, with a laugh of which the friendly ring covered as much as possible her equivocation.

“Ah, you like me enough to care,” he murmured, turning on her his sad, grateful eyes.

“I am very sorry for you. Ma che vuole?”

The Prince had, apparently, nothing to suggest, and he only exhaled, in reply, another gloomy groan. Then he inquired whether his wife pleased herself in that country, and whether she intended to pass the summer in London. Would she remain long in England, and – might he take the liberty to ask? – what were her plans? Madame Grandoni explained that the Princess had found the British metropolis much more to her taste than one might have expected, and that as for plans, she had as many, or as few, as she had always had. Had he ever known her to carry out any arrangement, or to do anything, of any kind, she had selected or determined upon? She always, at the last moment, did the other thing, the one that had been out of the question; and it was for this that Madame Grandoni herself privately made her preparations. Christina, now that everything was over, would leave London from one day to the other; but they should not know where they were going until they arrived. The old lady concluded by asking the Prince if he himself liked England. He thrust forward his thick lips. “How can I like anything? Besides, I have been here before: I have friends,” he said.

His companion perceived that he had more to say to her, to extract from her, but that he was hesitating nervously, because he feared to incur some warning, some rebuff, with which his dignity – which, in spite of his position of discomfiture, was really very great – might find it difficult to square itself. He looked vaguely round the room, and presently he remarked, “I wanted to see for myself how she is living.”

“Yes, that is very natural.”

“I have heard – I have heard —” and Prince Casamassima stopped.

“You have heard great rubbish, I have no doubt.” Madame Grandoni watched him, as if she foresaw what was coming.

“She spends a terrible deal of money,” said the young man.

“Indeed she does.” The old lady knew that, careful as he was of his very considerable property, which at one time had required much nursing, his wife’s prodigality was not what lay heaviest on his mind. She also knew that expensive and luxurious as Christina might be she had never yet exceeded the income settled upon her by the Prince at the time of their separation – an income determined wholly by himself and his estimate of what was required to maintain the social consequence of his name, for which he had a boundless reverence. “She thinks she is a model of thrift – that she counts every shilling,” Madame Grandoni continued. “If there is a virtue she prides herself upon, it’s her economy. Indeed, it’s the only thing for which she takes any credit.”

“I wonder if she knows that I” – the Prince hesitated a moment, then he went on – “that I spend really nothing. But I would rather live on dry bread than that, in a country like this, in this English society, she should not make a proper appearance.”

“Her appearance is all you could wish. How can it help being proper, with me to set her off?”

“You are the best thing she has, dear lady. So long as you are with her I feel a certain degree of security; and one of the things I came for was to extract from you a promise that you won’t leave her.”

“Ah, let us not tangle ourselves up with promises!” Madame Grandoni exclaimed. “You know the value of any engagement one may take with regard to the Princess; it’s like promising you I will stay in the bath when the hot water is turned on. When I begin to be scalded, I have to jump out! I will stay while I can; but I shouldn’t stay if she were to do certain things.” Madame Grandoni uttered these last words very gravely, and for a minute she and her companion looked deep into each other’s eyes.

“What things do you mean?”

“I can’t say what things. It is utterly impossible to predict, on any occasion, what Christina will do. She is capable of giving us great surprises. The things I mean are things I should recognise as soon as I saw them, and they would make me leave the house on the instant.”

“So that if you have not left it yet —?” the Prince asked, in a low tone, with extreme eagerness.

“It is because I have thought I may do some good by staying.”

The young man seemed only half satisfied with this answer; nevertheless he said in a moment – “To me it makes all the difference. And if anything of the kind you speak of should hap............