embodied, a
beautifully deprecating apology for her husband, who was all geniality
and humility among his own treasures, but as to whom the legend had
grown up that he couldn't bear, with the height of his standards and the
tone of the company, in the way of sofas and cabinets, habitually kept
by him, the irritation and depression to which promiscuous visiting,
even at pompous houses, had been found to expose him. That was all
right, the noted working harmony of the clever son-in-law and the
charming stepmother, so long as the relation was, for the effect in
question, maintained at the proper point between sufficiency and excess.

What with the noble fairness of the place, meanwhile, the generous mood
of the sunny, gusty, lusty English April, all panting and heaving with
impatience, or kicking and crying, even, at moments, like some infant
Hercules who wouldn't be dressed; what with these things and the bravery
of youth and beauty, the insolence of fortune and appetite so diffused
among his fellow-guests that the poor Assinghams, in their comparatively
marked maturity and their comparatively small splendour, were the only
approach to a false note in the concert, the stir of the air was
such, for going, in a degree, to one's head, that, as a mere matter of
exposure, almost grotesque in its flagrancy, his situation resembled
some elaborate practical joke carried out at his expense. Every voice in
the great bright house was a call to the ingenuities and impunities
of pleasure; every echo was a defiance of difficulty, doubt or danger;
every aspect of the picture, a glowing plea for the immediate, and as
with plenty more to come, was another phase of the spell. For a world so
constituted was governed by a spell, that of the smile of the gods and
the favour of the powers; the only handsome, the only gallant, in fact
the only intelligent acceptance of which was a faith in its guarantees
and a high spirit for its chances. Its demand--to that the thing came
back--was above all for courage and good-humour; and the value of
this as a general assurance--that is for seeing one through at the
worst--had not even in the easiest hours of his old Roman life struck
the Prince so convincingly. His old Roman life had had more poetry, no
doubt, but as he looked back upon it now it seemed to hang in the air
of mere iridescent horizons, to have been loose and vague and thin, with
large languorous unaccountable blanks. The present order, as it