in presence, during the previous winter, by some
chance of travel, through Sicily, through Italy, through the south of
France, but his _Seigneurie_--so Berridge liked exotically to phrase
it--had then (in ignorance of the present reasons) not noticed _him_. It
was positive for the man of established identity, all the while too,
and through the perfect lucidity of his sense of achievement in an air
"conducting" nothing but the loudest bang, that this was fundamentally
much less remarkable than the fact of his being made up to in such a
quarter now. That was the disservice, in a manner, of one's having so
much imagination: the mysterious values of other types kept looming
larger before you than the doubtless often higher but comparatively
familiar ones of your own, and if you had anything of the artist's
real feeling for life the attraction and amusement of possibilities so
projected were worth more to you, in nineteen moods out of twenty, than
the sufficiency, the serenity, the felicity, whatever it might be,
of your stale personal certitudes. You were intellectually, you were
"artistically" rather abject, in fine, if your curiosity (in the grand
sense of the term) wasn't worth more to you than your dignity. What was
your dignity, "anyway," but just the consistency of your curiosity, and
what moments were ever so ignoble for you as, under the blighting breath
of the false gods, stupid conventions, traditions, examples, your lapses
from that consistency? His _Seigneurie_, at all events, delightfully,
hadn't the least real idea of what any John Berridge was talking about,
and the latter felt that if he had been less beautifully witless, and
thereby less true to his right figure, it might scarce have been
forgiven him.

His right figure was that of life in irreflective joy and at the highest
thinkable level of prepared security and unconscious insolence. What was
the pale page of fiction compared with the intimately personal adventure
that, in almost any direction, he would have been all so stupidly,
all so gallantly, all so instinctively and, by every presumption,
so prevailingly ready for? Berridge would have given six months'
"royalties" for even an hour of his looser dormant consciousness--since
one was oneself, after all, no worm, but an heir of all the ages
too--and yet without being able to supply chapter and verse for the
felt, the huge difference. His _Seigneurie_ was tall and straight, but
so, thank goodness, was