This etext was produced by Eve Sobol, South Bend, Indiana, USA
1904
The Prince had always liked his London, when it had come to him;he was one of the modern Romans who find by the Thames a moreconvincing image of the truth of the ancient state than any theyhave left by the Tiber. Brought up on the legend of the City towhich the world paid tribute, he recognised in the present Londonmuch more than in contemporary Rome the real dimensions of such acase. If it was a question of an Imperium, he said to himself,and if one wished, as a Roman, to recover a little the sense ofthat, the place to do so was on London Bridge, or even, on a fineafternoon in May, at Hyde Park Corner. It was not indeed toeither of those places that these grounds of his predilection,after all sufficiently vague, had, at the moment we are concernedwith him, guided his steps; he had strayed, simply enough, intoBond Street, where his imagination, working at comparativelyshort range, caused him now and then to stop before a window inwhich objects massive and lumpish, in silver and gold, in theforms to which precious stones contribute, or in leather, steel,brass, applied to a hundred uses and abuses, were as tumbledtogether as if, in the insolence of the Empire, they had been theloot of far-off victories. The young man's movements, however,betrayed no consistency of attention—not even, for that matter,when one of his arrests had proceeded from possibilities in facesshaded, as they passed him on the pavement, by huge beribbonedhats, or more delicately tinted still under the tense silk ofparasols held at perverse angles in waiting victorias. And thePrince's undirected thought was not a little symptomatic, since,though the turn of the season had come and the flush of thestreets begun to fade, the possibilities of faces, on the Augustafternoon, were still one of the notes of the scene. He was toorestless—that was the fact—for any concentration, and the lastidea that would just now have occurred to him in any connectionwas the idea of pursuit.
He had been pursuing for six months as never in his life before,and what had actually unsteadied him, as we join him, was thesense of how he had been justified. Capture had crowned thepursuit—or success, as he would otherwise have put it, hadrewarded virtue; whereby the consciousness of these things madehim, for the hour, rather serious than gay. A sobriety that mighthave consorted with failure sat in his handsome face,constructively regular and grave, yet at the same time oddly and,as might be, functionally almost radiant, with its dark blueeyes, its dark brown moustache and its expression no more sharply"foreign" to an English view than to have caused it sometimes tobe observed of him with a shallow felicity that he looked like a"refined" Irishman. What had happened was that shortly before, atthree o'clock, his fate had practically been sealed, and thateven when one pretended to no quarrel with it the moment hadsomething of the grimness of a crunched key in the strongest lockthat could be made. There was nothing to do as yet, further, butfeel what one had done, and our personage felt it while heaimlessly wandered. It was already as if he were married, sodefinitely had the solicitors, at three o'clock, enabled the dateto be fixed, and by so few days was that date now distant. Hewas to dine at half-past eight o'clock with the young lady onwhose behalf, and on whose father's, the London lawyers hadreached an inspired harmony with his own man of business, poorCalderoni