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