got the face as a specimen of imperturbability watched,
with wonder, across the hushed rattle of roulette at Monte-Carlo; but
this quickly became as improbable as any question of a vulgar
_table d'hote_, or a steam-boat deck, or a herd of fellow-pilgrims
cicerone-led, or even an opera-box serving, during a performance, for
frame of a type observed from the stalls. One placed young gods and
goddesses only when one placed them on Olympus, and it met the case,
always, that they were of Olympian race, and that they glimmered
for one, at the best, through their silver cloud, like the visiting
apparitions in an epic.

This was brief and beautiful indeed till something happened that gave
it, for Berridge, on the spot, a prodigious extension--an extension
really as prodigious, after a little, as if he had suddenly seen the
silver clouds multiply and then the whole of Olympus presently open.
Music, breaking upon the large air, enjoined immediate attention, and in
a moment he was listening, with the rest of the company, to an eminent
tenor, who stood by the piano; and was aware, with it, that his
Englishman had turned away and that in the vast, rich, tapestried room
where, in spite of figures and objects so numerous, clear spaces, wide
vistas, and, as they might be called, becoming situations abounded,
there had been from elsewhere, at the signal of unmistakable song, a
rapid accession of guests. At first he but took this in, and the way
that several young women, for whom seats had been found, looked charming
in the rapt attitude; while even the men, mostly standing and grouped,
"composed," in their stillness, scarce less impressively, under the sway
of the divine voice. It ruled the scene, to the last intensity, and yet
our young man's fine sense found still a resource in the range of the
eyes, without sound or motion, while all the rest of consciousness was
held down as by a hand mailed in silver. It was better, in this way,
than the opera--John alertly thought of that: the composition sung might
be Wagnerian, but no Tristram, no Iseult, no Parsifal and, no Kundry of
them all could ever show, could ever "act" to the music, as our friend
had thus the power of seeing his dear contemporaries of either sex
(armoured _they_ so otherwise than in cheap Teutonic tinsel!) just
continuously and inscrutably sit to it.

It made, the whole thing together, an enchantment amid which he had in
truth, at a given moment, ceased to distinguish p