rehensiveness in regard to worth becomes aware of
any marked superiority in a fellow creature,--an experience which in
unhappy lives very seldom occurs,--a feeling of certainty usually
accompanies it, which is as mysterious as the evidence upon which it is
based is intangible and elusive. A man knows that he has met his
superior, he knows too how far the superiority he recognises extends,
and he is conscious of experiencing something exceptional, something
exquisitely precious.

That such encounters are becoming every day more rare, probably explains
the increasing growth, in modern times, of that kind of disbelief and
heresy which, far from being wanton, arises from a total inability to
envisage greatness, whether in kings, ideals, or gods. For we arrive at
our most exalted images, not by solitary flights of imagination
unassisted, but by actual progressive steps in the world of concrete
things; so that the spring-board from which we take our final leap into
the highest concepts of what a god might be, is always the highest man
we happen to have met. We can have no other starting-point. Hence in an
age when greatness among men is too rare to be felt as a universal fact,
a disbelief in all gods is bound sooner or later to supervene.

When Lord Henry Highbarn presented himself before Sir Joseph, it was
plain from the meek droop of the baronet's eyelids and the subdued
hesitating tone of his voice, that something in the young nobleman's
appearance had like a flash intimated to the experienced financial
magnate that here was someone of a quality as unfamiliar as it was rare.
Moreover, the difference which the older man felt distinguished him from
his visitor was of a kind too fundamental and insuperable to challenge
even that friendly rivalry so instinctive between two natures each
conscious of their own particular efficiency and excellence.

Indeed, it needed all the elaborate complications of our modern
civilisation to account even for the meeting of these two people under
the same roof, not to speak of the fact that they met on an equal
footing.

The one, a plain but not unpretentious man of business, still a little
perplexed by his stupendous success, and not yet certain of his precise
social level, revealed in his unshapely but kindly features the modest
rung on which Nature herself would probably have placed him, if the
peculiar economic conditions of his Age had not intervened to bring
about a different result;