to ascend to her room, she presented her highly--decorated back--in
which, in odd places, controlling the complications of its aspect, the
ruby or the garnet, the turquoise and the topaz, gleamed like faint
symbols of the wit that pinned together the satin patches of her
argument.

He watched her as if she left him positively under the impression of her
mastery of her subject; yes, as if the real upshot of the drama before
them was but that he had, when it came to the tight places of life--as
life had shrunk for him now--the most luminous of wives. He turned off,
in this view of her majestic retreat, the comparatively faint little
electric lamp which had presided over their talk; then he went up as
immediately behind her as the billows of her amber train allowed, making
out how all the clearness they had conquered was even for herself
a relief--how at last the sense of the amplitude of her exposition
sustained and floated her. Joining her, however, on the landing above,
where she had already touched a metallic point into light, he found she
had done perhaps even more to create than to extinguish in him the germ
of a curiosity. He held her a minute longer--there was another plum
in the pie. "What did you mean some minutes ago by his not caring for
Charlotte?"

"The Prince's? By his not 'really' caring?" She recalled, after a
little, benevolently enough. "I mean that men don't, when it has all
been too easy. That's how, in nine cases out of ten, a woman is treated
who has risked her life. You asked me just now how he works," she added;
"but you might better perhaps have asked me how he plays."

Well, he made it up. "Like a Prince?"

"Like a Prince. He is, profoundly, a Prince. For that," she said with
expression, "he's--beautifully--a case. They're far rarer, even in the
'highest circles,' than they pretend to be--and that's what makes so
much of his value. He's perhaps one of the very last--the last of the
real ones. So it is we must take him. We must take him all round."

The Colonel considered. "And how must Charlotte--if anything
happens--take him?"

The question held her a minute, and while she waited, with her eyes on
him, she put out a grasping hand to his arm, in the flesh of which
he felt her answer distinctly enough registered. Thus she gave him,
standing off a little, the firmest, longest, deepest injunction he had
ever received from her. "Nothing--in spite of everything--WILL happen.
Nothing HAS happen