The Finer Grain | Page 7

frankest and almost
the crudest avowal of the impression they had made on each other. He
couldn't have named, later on, any other person she had during this
space been engaged with, any more than he was to remember in the
least what he had himself ostensibly done, who had spoken to him,
whom he had spoken to, or whether he hadn't just stood and publicly
gaped or languished.
Ah, Olympians were unconventional indeed--that was a part of their
high bravery and privilege; but what it also appeared to attest in this

wondrous manner was that they could communicate to their chosen in
three minutes, by the mere light of their eyes, the same shining
cynicism. He was to wonder of course, tinglingly enough, whether he
had really made an ass of himself, and there was this amount of
evidence for it that there certainly had been a series of moments each
one of which glowed with the lucid sense that, as she couldn't like him
as much as that either for his acted clap-trap or for his printed verbiage,
what it must come to was that she liked him, and to such a tune, just for
himself and quite after no other fashion than that in which every
goddess in the calendar had, when you came to look, sooner or later
liked some prepossessing young shepherd. The question would thus
have been, for him, with a still sharper eventual ache, of whether he
positively had, as an effect of the miracle, been petrified, before fifty
pair of eyes, to the posture of a prepossessing shepherd--and would
perhaps have left him under the shadow of some such imputable fatuity
if his consciousness hadn't, at a given moment, cleared up to still
stranger things.
The agent of the change was, as quite congruously happened, none
other than the shining youth whom he now seemed to himself to have
been thinking of for ever so long, for a much longer time than he had
ever in his life spent at an evening party, as the young Lord: which
personage suddenly stood before him again, holding him up an odd
object and smiling, as if in reference to it, with a gladness that at once
struck our friend as almost too absurd for belief. The object was
incongruous by reason of its being, to a second and less preoccupied
glance, a book; and what had befallen Berridge within twenty minutes
was that they--the Princess and he, that is--had got such millions of
miles, or at least such thousands of years, away from those platitudes.
The book, he found himself assuming, could only be his book (it
seemed also to have a tawdry red cover); and there came to him
memories, dreadfully false notes sounded so straight again by his new
acquaintance, of certain altogether different persons who at certain
altogether different parties had flourished volumes before him very
much with that insinuating gesture, that arch expression, and that fell
intention. The meaning of these things--of all possible breaks of the
charm at such an hour!--was that he should "signature" the ugly thing,

and with a characteristic quotation or sentiment: that was the way
people simpered and squirmed, the way they mouthed and beckoned,
when animated by such purposes; and it already, on the spot, almost
broke his heart to see such a type as that of the young Lord brought, by
the vulgarest of fashions, so low. This state of quick displeasure in
Berridge, however, was founded on a deeper question--the question of
how in the world he was to remain for himself a prepossessing
shepherd if he should consent to come back to these base actualities. It
was true that even while this wonderment held him, his aggressor's
perfect good conscience had placed the matter in a slightly different
light.
"By an extraordinary chance I've found a copy of my friend's novel on
one of the tables here--I see by the inscription that she has presented it
to Gloriani. So if you'd like to glance at it--!" And the young Lord, in
the pride of his association with the eminent thing, held it out to
Berridge as artlessly as if it had been a striking natural specimen of
some sort, a rosy round apple grown in his own orchard, or an
exceptional precious stone, to be admired for its weight and lustre.
Berridge accepted the offer mechanically--relieved at the prompt fading
of his worst fear, yet feeling in himself a tell-tale facial blankness for
the still absolutely anomalous character of his friend's appeal. He was
even tempted for a moment to lay the volume down without looking at
it--only with some extemporised promise to borrow it of their host and
take it home, to give himself to it at an easier moment. Then the