The Golden Bowl.
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 more convincing image of the truth of the ancient
state than any they have left by the Tiber.
Brought up on the legend of the City to which the world paid tribute,
he recognised in the present London much more than
in contemporary Rome the real dimensions of such a case.
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 of that,
the place to do so was on London Bridge, or even,
on a fine afternoon in May, at Hyde Park Corner.
It was not indeed to either of those places that
these grounds of his predilection, after all sufficiently vague, had,
at the moment we are concerned with him, guided his steps;
he had strayed, simply enough, into Bond Street,
where his imagination, working at comparatively short range,
caused him now and then to stop before a window in which
objects massive and lumpish, in silver and gold,
in the forms to which precious stones contribute, or in leather,
steel, brass, applied to a hundred uses and abuses,
were as tumbled together as if, in the insolence of the Empire,
they had been the loot 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 faces
shaded, as they passed him on the pavement, by huge beribboned hats,
or more delicately tinted still under the tense silk of parasols held
at perverse angles in waiting victorias.
And the Prince's undirected thought was not a little symptomatic,
since,
though the turn of the season had come and
the flush of the streets begun to fade, the possibilities of faces,
on the August afternoon, were still one of the notes of the scene.
He was too restless--that was the fact--for any concentration,
and the last idea that
would just now have occurred to him in any connection was the idea of
pursuit.
Bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork
bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork
bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork.