The Prince took not unkindly to the sailorman, who had written two very curious books about the sea. They were much overrated, in the Prince's opinion. The style was uncertain, and the colors were laid on too thick for anything, but people who knew Ted Ambrose, for instance, thought a good deal of them. Personally, the Prince believed in style. Stevenson, for example, wrote like an educated man. This man's writing in its crude force had somehow the air of the lower deck. Ambrose said there was greatness in it, all the same. Personally, the Prince preferred polished mediocrity, and was not ashamed of the fact, not that one could call a chap like Stevenson mediocre. But this man Harper lacked something, although it was to his credit to admit that he had never heard of Nietzsche. But obviously he hadn't. VIII Mary's enthusiasm for the sailorman was shared by Silvia, although not perhaps in an equal degree. Lady Pridmore was inclined to be a little distressed by it, in the way that she was inclined to be a little distressed by so many things. The Prince merely thought there was no harm in the chap, but that he was a freak. Edward Ambrose, who had discovered what Lady Pridmore considered this rather odd young man, had many questions to answer when next he appeared in Queen Street. As a particular friend of the house, he turned the tables by adroitly chaffing Lady Pridmore and the Prince, and by ministering gaily to Mary's and Silvia's tempered ecstasies. In the meantime, the Sailor was indulging little private ecstasies of his own. The visit to a Mayfair drawing-room had marked one more epoch in a strange career. He had entered another new and wonderful world. It was a world whose language was a closed book to him at present. Perhaps it always would be; at any rate, it seemed to lie out of the range even of Madame Sadleir, whose instruction he still courted diligently. It was a world of peculiar grace, of external harmony and beauty. The trained minds marching with the trained movements of these people lent the quality of poetry to all they said and did. And they took what he could only call their refinement so much for granted, that they seemed almost to apologize for the sheer niceness in which they had so completely enveloped themselves. He had not known that such people existed in mass and bulk, at least that they had a corporate life of their own. The glamour they had for him was extraordinary. It would have been impossible to think without a thrill of his friend Miss Pridmore, even if she had not been the sister of the immortal Klondyke.