She was directly and immediately real, real on a pleasantly reduced and intimate scale, and at no moments more so than during those--at which we have just glanced--when Mrs.Noble made them both together feel that she, she alone, in the absence of the queen-mother, was regent of the realm and governess of the heir.

Treated on such occasions as at best a pair of dangling and merely nominal court-functionaries, picturesque hereditary triflers entitled to the petites entrees but quite external to the State, which began and ended with the Nursery, they could only retire, in quickened sociability, to what was left them of the Palace, there to digest their gilded insignificance and cultivate, in regard to the true Executive, such snuff-taking ironies as might belong to rococo chamberlains moving among china lap-dogs.
Every evening, after dinner, Charlotte Stant played to him; seated at the piano and requiring no music, she went through his "favourite things"-- and he had many favourites--with a facility that never failed, or that failed but just enough to pick itself up at a touch from his fitful voice.

She could play anything, she could play everything--always shockingly, she of course insisted, but always, by his own vague measure, very much as if she might, slim, sinuous and strong, and with practised passion, have been playing lawn-tennis or endlessly and rhythmically waltzing.

His love of music, unlike his other loves, owned to vaguenesses, but while, on his comparatively shaded sofa, and smoking, smoking, always smoking, in the great Fawns drawing-room as everywhere, the cigars of his youth, rank with associations--while, I say, he so listened to Charlotte's piano, where the score was ever absent but, between the lighted candles, the picture distinct, the vagueness spread itself about him like some boundless carpet, a surface delightfully soft to the pressure of his interest.

It was a manner of passing the time that rather replaced conversation, but the air, at the end, none the less, before they separated, had a way of seeming full of the echoes of talk.