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!) but of the new champion to be reckoned with, the invincible
young lion of the day? What was more of it in short than her having
perhaps even positively snubbed for him the great mystified Sculptor and
the great bewildered Dramatist, treated to this queer experience for the
first time of their lives?

It all came back again to the really great ease of really great ladies,
and to the perfect facility of everything when once they were great
enough. _That_ might become the delicious thing to him, he more and more
felt, as soon as it should be supremely attested; it was ground he had
ventured on, scenically, representation-ally, in the artistic sphere,
but without ever dreaming he should "realise" it thus in the social.
Handsomely, gallantly just now, moreover, he didn't so much as let it
occur to him that the social experience would perhaps on some future
occasion richly profit further scenic efforts; he only lost himself in
the consciousness of all she invited him to believe. It took licence,
this consciousness, the next moment, for a tremendous further throb,
from what she had gone on to say to him in so many words--though indeed
the words were nothing and it was all a matter but of the implication
that glimmered through them: "Do you _want_ very much your supper here?"
And then while he felt himself glare, for charmed response, almost to
the point of his tears rising with it: "Because if you don't----!"

"Because if I don't--?" She had paused, not from the faintest shade of
timidity, but clearly for the pleasure of making him press.

"Why shouldn't we go together, letting me drive you home?"

"You'll come home with me?" gasped John Berridge while the perspiration
on his brow might have been the morning dew on a high lawn of Mount Ida.

"No--you had better come with _me_. That's what I mean; but I certainly
will come to you with pleasure some time if you'll let me."

She made no more than that of the most fatuous of freedoms, as he felt
directly he had spoken that it might have seemed to her; and before
he had even time to welcome the relief of not having then himself, for
beastly contrition, to make more of it, she had simply mentioned, with
her affectionate ease, that she wanted to get away, that of the bores
there she might easily, after a little, have too m