He hadn't told me he was ill again that he had had a
warning; but I hadn't needed this, for I found his reticence his
worst symptom. The only thing he said to me was that he believed a
comfortable attack of something or other would set him up: it
would put out of the question everything but the exemptions he
prized. I'm afraid I shall have presented him as a martyr in a
very small cause if I fail to explain that he surrendered himself
much more liberally than I surrendered him. He filled his lungs,
for the most part; with the comedy of his queer fate: the tragedy
was in the spectacles through which I chose to look. He was
conscious of inconvenience, and above all of a great renouncement;
but how could he have heard a mere dirge in the bells of his
accession? The sagacity and the jealousy were mine, and his the
impressions and the harvest. Of course, as regards Mrs. Wimbush, I
was worsted in my encounters, for wasn't the state of his health
the very reason for his coming to her at Prestidge? Wasn't it
precisely at Prestidge that he was to be coddled, and wasn't the
dear Princess coming to help her to coddle him? The dear Princess,
now on a visit to England, was of a famous foreign house, and, in
her gilded cage, with her retinue of keepers and feeders, was the
most expensive specimen in the good lady's collection.
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