The Finer Grain | Page 9

or of an attack of
dyspeptic dizziness; albeit indeed that he wasn't conscious of this
absurd, this instinctive nervous clutch till the thing that was to be more
wonderful than any yet suddenly flared up for him--the sight of the
Princess again on the threshold of the room, poised there an instant, in
her exquisite grace, for recovery of some one or of something, and then,
at recognition of him, coming straight to him across the empty place as
if he alone, and nobody and nothing else, were what she incredibly
wanted. She was there, she was radiantly at him, as if she had known
and loved him for ten years--ten years during which, however, she had
never quite been able, in spite of undiscouraged attempts, to cure him,
as goddesses had to cure shepherds, of his mere mortal shyness.
"Ah no, not that one!" she said at once, with her divine familiarity; for
she had in the flash of an eye "spotted" the particular literary
production he seemed so very fondly to have possessed himself of and
against which all the Amy Evans in her, as she would doubtless have

put it, clearly wished on the spot to discriminate. She pulled it away
from him; he let it go; he scarce knew what was happening--only made
out that she distinguished the right one, the one that should have been
shown him, as blue or green or purple, and intimated that her other
friend, her fellow-Olympian, as Berridge had thought of him from the
first, really did too clumsily bungle matters, poor dear, with his
officiousness over the red one! She went on really as if she had come
for that, some such rectification, some such eagerness of reunion with
dear Mr. Berridge, some talk, after all the tiresome music, of questions
really urgent; while, thanks to the supreme strangeness of it, the high
tide of golden fable floated him afresh, and her pretext and her plea, the
queerness of her offered motive, melted away after the fashion of the
enveloping clouds that do their office in epics and idylls. "You didn't
perhaps know I'm Amy Evans," she smiled, "or even perhaps that I
write in English--which I love, I assure you, as much as you can
yourself do, and which gives one (doesn't it? for who should know if
not you?) the biggest of publics. I 'just love'--don't they say?--your
American millions; and all the more that they really take me for Amy
Evans, as I've just wanted to be taken, to be loved too for myself, don't
you know?--that they haven't seemed to try at all to 'go behind' (don't
you say?) my poor dear little nom de guerre. But it's the new one, my
last, 'The Velvet Glove,' that I should like you to judge me by--if such a
corvee isn't too horrible for you to think of; though I admit it's a move
straight in the romantic direction--since after all (for I might as well
make a clean breast of it) it's dear old discredited romance that I'm most
in sympathy with. I'll send you 'The Velvet Glove' to-morrow, if you
can find half an hour for it; and then--and then--!" She paused as for the
positive bright glory of her meaning.
It could only be so extraordinary, her meaning, whatever it was, that the
need in him that would--whatever it was again!--meet it most
absolutely formed the syllables on his lips as: "Will you be very, very
kind to me?"
"Ah 'kind,' dear Mr. Berridge? 'Kind,'" she splendidly laughed, "is
nothing to what--!" But she pulled herself up again an instant. "Well, to
what I want to be! Just see," she said, "how I want to be!" It was

exactly, he felt, what he couldn't but see--in spite of books and publics
and pen-names, in spite of the really "decadent" perversity, recalling
that of the most irresponsibly insolent of the old Romans and
Byzantines, that could lead a creature so formed for living and
breathing her Romance, and so committed, up to the eyes, to the
constant fact of her personal immersion in it and genius for it, the
dreadful amateurish dance of ungrammatically scribbling it, with
editions and advertisements and reviews and royalties and every other
futile item: since what was more of the deep essence of throbbing
intercourse itself than this very act of her having broken away from
people, in the other room, to whom he was as nought, of her having,
with her crânerie of audacity and indifference, just turned her back on
them all as soon as she had begun to miss him? What was more of it
than her having forbidden them, by a sufficient curt ring of her own
supremely silver tone, to attempt to check or criticise her freedom,