It was the more baffling because those around him, older and wiser than he, appeared to take the situation for granted and to treat it with a seriousness that sometimes led him, when, forgetful, he was off his guard, to believe that the country was a real country and that its statesmen, Platon Malteios, Gregori Stavridis, and the rest, were real statesmen working soberly towards a definite end. That its riots were revolutions; that its factions were political parties; that its discordant, abusive, wrangling Chamber was indeed a Senate. That its four hundred stout soldiers, who periodically paraded the _platia_ under the command of a general in a uniform designed by a theatrical costumier in Buda-Pesth, were indeed an army. That the _platia_ itself was a forum. That the society was brilliant; that its liaisons had the dignity of great passions. That his aunt, who talked weightily and contradicted every one, including herself--the only person who ever ventured to do such a thing--was indeed a political figure, an Egeria among the men in whose hands lay the direction of affairs. In his more forgetful moments, he was tempted to believe these things, when he saw his father and his Uncle Robert, both unbending, incisive, hard-headed business men, believing them. As a rule, preserving his nice sense of perspective, he saw them as a setting to Eve. He was beginning to adjust himself again to the life which faded with so extraordinary a rapidity as the express or the steamer bore him away, three times a year, to England. It faded always then like a photographic proof when exposed to the light. The political jargon was the first to go--he knew the sequence--'civil war,' 'independent archipelago,' 'overthrow of the Cabinet,' 'a threat to the Malteios party,' 'intrigues of the Stavridists,' the well-known phrases that, through sheer force of reiteration, he accepted without analysis; then, after the political jargon, the familiar figures that he saw almost daily, Sharp, his father's chief clerk; Aristotle, the door-keeper, his tussore fustanelle hanging magisterially from the rotundity of his portentous figure; Madame Lafarge, erect, and upholstered like a sofa, driving in her barouche; the young men at the club, languid and insolent and licentious; then, after the familiar figures, the familiar scenes; and lastly Eve herself, till he could no longer recall the drowsy tones of her voice, or evoke her eyes, that, though alive with malice and mockery, were yet charged with a mystery to which he could give no name. He was sad when these things began to fade. He clung on to them, because they were dear, but they slipped through his fingers like running water. Their evanescence served only to convince him the more of their unreality.