Hyacinth knew neither how far Captain Sholto had been going, nor exactly on what he congratulated him; and he pretended at least an equal ignorance on the subject of Millicent’s pecuniary gains. He didn’t want to talk about her, moreover, nor about his own life; he wanted to talk about the Captain’s and to elicit information that would be in harmony with his romantic chambers, which reminded one somehow of certain of Bulwer’s novels. His host gratified this pretension most liberally and told him twenty stories of things of interest, often of amazement, that had happened to him in Albania, in Madagascar and even in Paris. Hyacinth induced him easily to talk about Paris (from a different point of view from M. Poupin’s) and sat there drinking in enchantments. The only thing that fell below the high level of his entertainment was the bindings of his friend’s books, which he told him frankly, with the conscience of an artist, were not up to the mark. After he left Queen Anne Street he was quite too excited to go straight home; he walked about with his mind full of images and strange speculations till the grey London streets began to clear with the summer dawn. XVI The aspect of South Street, Mayfair, on a Sunday afternoon in August, is not enlivening, yet the Prince had stood for ten minutes gazing out of the window at the genteel vacancy of the scene; at the closed blinds of the opposite houses, the lonely policeman on the corner, covering a yawn with a white cotton hand, the low-pitched light itself, which seemed conscious of an obligation to observe the decency of the British Sabbath. Our personage, however, had a talent for that kind of attitude: it was one of the things by which he had exasperated his wife; he could remain motionless, with the aid of some casual support for his high, lean person, considering serenely and inexpressively any object that might lie before him and presenting his aristocratic head at a favourable angle, for periods of extraordinary length. On first coming into the room he had given some attention to its furniture and decorations, perceiving at a glance that they were rich and varied; some of the things he recognised as old friends, odds and ends the Princess was fond of, which had accompanied her in her remarkable wanderings, while others were unfamiliar and suggested vividly that she had not ceased to “collect.” He made two reflexions: one was that she was living as expensively as ever; the other that, however this might be, no one had such a feeling as she for the _mise-en-scène_ of life, such a talent for arranging a room. She had always, wherever she was, the most charming room in Europe.