The reference put
the author of "The Heart of Gold" quite into _his_ place, but left the
speaker absolutely free of Arcady. "Thanks awfully"--Berridge somehow
clutched at that, to keep everything from swimming. "Yes, I should like
to look at it," he managed, horribly grimacing now, he believed, to say;
and there was in fact a strange short interlude after this in which he
scarce knew what had become of any one or of anything; in which he only
seemed to himself to stand alone in a desolate place where even its
desolation didn't save him from having to stare at the greyest of
printed pages. Nothing here helped anything else, since the stamped
greyness didn't even in itself make it impossible his eyes should follow
such sentences as: "The loveliness of the face, which was that of the
glorious period in which Pheidias reigned supreme, and which owed its
most exquisite note to that shell-like curl of the upper lip which
always somehow recalls for us the smile with which windblown Astarte
must have risen from the salt sea to which she owed her birth and her
terrible moods; or it was too much for all the passionate woman in her,
and she let herself go, over the flowering land that had been, but was
no longer their love, with an effect of blighting desolation that might
have proceeded from one of the more physical, though not more awful,
convulsions of nature."

He seemed to know later on that other and much more natural things
had occurred; as that, for instance, with now at last a definite
intermission of the rare music that for a long time past, save at the
briefest intervals, had kept all participants ostensibly attentive
and motionless, and that in spite of its high quality and the supposed
privilege of listening to it he had allowed himself not to catch a note
of, there was a great rustling and shifting and vociferous drop to a
lower plane, more marked still with the quick clearance of a way to
supper and a lively dispersal of most of the guests. Hadn't he made out,
through the queer glare of appearances, though they yet somehow all came
to him as confused and unreal, that the Princess was no longer
there, wasn't even only crowded out of his range by the immediate
multiplication of her court, the obsequious court that the change
of pitch had at once permitted to close round her; that Gloriani had
offered her his arm, in a gallant official way, as to the greatest lady
present, and that he was left with half a dozen person