ere was a spirit in him that could rise
above it, a spirit that positively played with the facts, with all of
them; from that of the droll ambiguity of English relations to that
of his having in mind something quite beautiful and independent and
harmonious, something wholly his own. He couldn't somehow take Mr. Blint
seriously--he was much more an outsider, by the larger scale, even than
a Roman prince who consented to be in abeyance. Yet it was past finding
out, either, how such a woman as Lady Castledean could take him--since
this question but sank for him again into the fathomless depths of
English equivocation. He knew them all, as was said, "well"; he had
lived with them, stayed with them, dined, hunted, shot and done various
other things with them; but the number of questions about them he
couldn't have answered had much rather grown than shrunken, so that
experience struck him for the most part as having left in him but one
residual impression. They didn't like les situations nettes--that was
all he was very sure of. They wouldn't have them at any price; it had
been their national genius and their national success to avoid them
at every point. They called it themselves, with complacency, their
wonderful spirit of compromise--the very influence of which actually so
hung about him here, from moment to moment, that the earth and the air,
the light and the colour, the fields and the hills and the sky, the
blue-green counties and the cold cathedrals, owed to it every accent of
their tone. Verily, as one had to feel in presence of such a picture, it
had succeeded; it had made, up to now, for that seated solidity, in the
rich sea-mist, on which the garish, the supposedly envious, peoples have
ever cooled their eyes. But it was at the same time precisely why even
much initiation left one, at given moments, so puzzled as to the element
of staleness in all the freshness and of freshness in all the staleness,
of innocence in the guilt and of guilt in the innocence. There were
other marble terraces, sweeping more purple prospects, on which he would
have known what to think, and would have enjoyed thereby at least
the small intellectual fillip of a discerned relation between a given
appearance and a taken meaning. The inquiring mind, in these present
conditions, might, it was true, be more sharply challenged; but the
result of its attention and its ingenuity, it had unluckily learned to
know, was too often to be confronted with