The Finer Grain | Page 9

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 cranerie 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, than her having looked him up, at his distance, under all the noses he had put out of joint, so as to let them think whatever they might--not of herself (much she troubled to care!)