They hadn't come up for him, and it was as if she, positively, had herself kept them down.

She had only been his child--which she was indeed as much as ever; but there were sides on which she had protected him as if she were more than a daughter.

She had done for him more than he knew--much, and blissfully, as he always HAD known.

If she did at present more than ever, through having what she called the change in his life to make up to him for, his situation still, all the same, kept pace with her activity--his situation being simply that there was more than ever to be done.
There had not yet been quite so much, on all the showing, as since their return from their twenty months in America, as since their settlement again in England, experimental though it was, and the consequent sense, now quite established for him, of a domestic air that had cleared and lightened, producing the effect, for their common personal life, of wider perspectives and large waiting spaces.

It was as if his son-in-law's presence, even from before his becoming his son-in-law, had somehow filled the scene and blocked the future--very richly and handsomely, when all was said, not at all inconveniently or in ways not to have been desired: inasmuch as though the Prince, his measure now practically taken, was still pretty much the same "big fact," the sky had lifted, the horizon receded, the very foreground itself expanded, quite to match him, quite to keep everything in comfortable scale.