the whole
business, that made Berridge's sense of it most sharp. The sense of it
as _prodigy_ didn't in the least entail his feeling abject--any more,
that is, than in the due dazzled degree; for surely there would have
been supreme wonder in the eagerness of her exchange of mature glory for
thin notoriety, hadn't it still exceeded everything that an Olympian of
such race should have found herself bothered, as they said, to "read" at
all--and most of all to read three times!

With the turn the matter took as an effect of this meeting, Berridge was
more than once to find himself almost ashamed for her--since it seemed
never to occur to her to be so for herself: he was jealous of the
type where she might have been taken as insolently careless of it;
his advantage (unless indeed it had been his ruin) being that he could
inordinately reflect upon it, could wander off thereby into kinds of
licence of which she was incapable. He hadn't, for himself, waited till
now to be sure of what he would do were _he_ an Olympian: he would leave
his own stuff snugly unread, to begin with; that would be a beautiful
start for an Olympian career. He should have been as unable to write
those works in short as to make anything else of them; and he
should have had no more arithmetic for computing fingers than any
perfect-headed marble Apollo mutilated at the wrists. He should have
consented to know but the grand personal adventure on the grand
personal basis: nothing short of this, no poor cognisance of confusable,
pettifogging things, the sphere of earth-grubbing questions and
two-penny issues, would begin to be, on any side, Olympian enough.

Even the great Dramatist, with his tempered and tested steel and his
immense "assured" position, even he was not Olympian: the look, full of
the torment of earth, with which he had seen the Princess turn her back,
and for such a purpose, on the prized privilege of his notice, testified
sufficiently to that. Still, comparatively, it was to be said, the
question of a personal relation with an authority so eminent on the
subject of the passions--to say nothing of the rest of his charm--might
have had for an ardent young woman (and the Princess was unmistakably
ardent) the absolute attraction of romance: unless, again, prodigy of
prodigies, she were looking for her romance very particularly elsewhere.
Yet where could she have been looking for it, Berridge was to ask
himself with private intensity, in a mann